According to Hoberman (2009), "A data model is a wayfinding tool for both business and IT professionals, which uses a set of symbols and text to precisely explain a subset of real information to improve communication within the organization and thereby lead to a more flexible and stable application environment.
In software engineering, the term data model is used in two related senses. In the sense covered by this article, it is a description of the objects represented by a computer system together with their properties and relationships; these are typically "real world" objects such as products, suppliers, customers, and orders. In the second sense, covered by the article database model, it means a collection of concepts and rules used in defining data models: for example the relational model uses relations and tuples, while the network model uses records, sets, and fields.
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