[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML Schema as a data modeling tool
Are we are trying to replicate(rewrite) the data-modelling textbooks? This is a extract from the KLEEN 'Asset Oriented Modelling' Tool introductory paper at: http://www.aomodeling.org/KLEEN%20WhitePaper.pdf "Introducing Asset Oriented Modeling (AOM) Open scenarios It seems that the closed world assumption of the enterprise data model has become a thing of the past. The business requirements of electronic business, supply chain integration, company mergers, outsourcing, and flat enterprise business models ask for open data models that can easily interoperate. The revolution of data models These new requirements have led to new data models, data models that are far more flexible, extensible, and dynamic than what we were used to in the past. The widespread adoption of XML as a lingua franca throughout the IT- community is a clear indication that the existing data models (like the relational and object-oriented data models) are far too rigid and narrow to cope with the new requirements. It is the document metaphor which characterizes these new data models. The governing construction principle is no longer the relational table or the hierarchical object but the grammar. The revolution of data models has, of course, implications for conceptual modeling. Every time a new data model was introduced in the short history of computing, new conceptual modeling methods were introduced, too – methods that would cope better with the new data model. The introduction of the relational data model had sparked Entity Relationship Modeling, and the introduction of the object-oriented data model resulted in object-oriented modeling methods such as the UML and ORM. While these modeling methods served very well for their respective data models, they are not equally appropriate for the new grammar based data models. The result is a semantic impedance mismatch between conceptual model and implementation, a mismatch that adversely affects the communica- tion between the partners in the developing process. And, as you know, bad communication can be costly. AOM removes this roadblock from dynamic application development." "We Already Communicate in Graphs Graph modeling naturally fits with the way we tend to abstract the salient details from a domain using circles and boxes, and then describe the connections between these things by joining them with arrows. Today’s graph databases, more than any other da‐ tabase technologies, are “whiteboard friendly.” The typical whiteboard view of a problem is a graph. What we sketch in our creative and analytical modes maps closely to the data model we implement inside the database. In terms of expressivity, graph databases re‐ duce the impedance mismatch between analysis and implementation that has plagued relational database implementations for many years. What is particularly interesting about such graph models is the fact that they not only communicate how we think things are related, but they also clearly communicate the kinds of questions we want to ask of our domain. As we’ll see throughout this chapter, graph models and graph queries are really just two sides of the same coin." So, apparently, the first approach is based on the theory of "grammars" and the second on that of "graphs". This does seem to me to be what we are trying to elucidate here. [Is "Whiteboard Serialisation Format" actually a Graph Database DDL?] My personal interest in this does relate very much to the cost-benefit
equation, if my main purpose is to manage data via a web interface, it makes sense (to me) to model data in a way that allows cost-effective
generation of infra-structure (forms,query interfaces etc) using such a
"document metaphor". Or, is this likely to be a case of easy early gains but big
problems later? On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 5:41 AM, Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de> wrote:
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