[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML Schema as a data modeling tool
Data modelling for me is all about achieving a shared understanding of = the problem. It's something I usually do interactively on a whiteboard. = The resulting model needs to fit on the whiteboard and it needs to be = thrown away when you've finished - if it wasn't simple enough to be = memorised, then you have failed. For example I once did a workshop with people from a broadcaster. It was = all about programme scheduling. It was primarily about getting to a = point where everyone in the room had a common understanding of what they = meant by words like "programme", "advertisement", "channel", etc -- = which all led to some very interesting debates; and of course you = sometimes agree to split the concept, so = what-engineers-mean-by-a-channel becomes a different concept from = what-marketeers-mean-by-a-channel. The whiteboard ends up with lots of boxes and arrows because ultimately = the way to define a concept is to show how it relates to other concepts: = an-ad-is-a-kind-of-programme, a-program-has-many-transmissions, = a-transmission-happens-on-a-channel. I simply can't imagine doing this kind of exercise and restricting the = stuff on the whiteboard to be a hierarchy. It would be like restricting = yourself to only use one colour of felt pen: why would anyone want to do = that? Yes, there's a sense in which the term "real world" is unfortunate; the = model is always synthetic, and abstraction is vital. But I find the term = useful, because it reminds people that we are trying to improve our = understanding of the way things "out there" behave, not to design data = structures that are convenient to implement. Michael Kay Saxonica
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