  Difficulties arise when conceptual modeling lacks ontological clarity and
rigorous definitions, which is especially the case in the relationship
construct. Evidence shows that use of relationships is often problematic when
it comes to communicating the form of meaning of an application domain.
Research on this topic is important because relationships are central to a
number of approaches and commonly used by practitioners. In this paper, we
study the notion of relation or relationship in the context of conceptual
modeling. Specifically, we focus on the notion of relationship used in the
entity-relationship (ER) model. The ER model is scrutinized through a new form
of conceptual modeling called the thinging machine (TM) to pursue further
understanding of the semantics of the relationship concept. The ER model is
composed of three fundamental categories (i.e., entity, relationship and
attribute), whereas TM is built from one ontological category called the
thing/machine (thimac). Several ER diagrams are re-casted as TM diagrams,
creating a categorical collision with interesting implications regarding the
status of the conception of relationship in a conceptual model. The re-modeling
shows that the relational construct is dissipated into TM flows of things and
chronology of events.
