Re: domain questionnaire

On 22 Feb 2001 17:20:42 GMT, hidders_at_REMOVE.THIS.win.tue.nl (Jan Hidders) wrote:
>> > http://www.aw.com/product/0,2627,0201547325,00.html

I just ordered both components from B&N.

> http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/tods/1979-4-4/p397-codd/

Errrr, 1979?

>No, ORM can be roughly described as a dialect of entity-relationship
>models, but with a very good formal underpinning and an elaborate and
>well-defined set of notations for constraints.

ORM being Object Relational Model? I think it may be impossible to do this correctly and still see it as a dialect of relational -- and if E/R is something other than relational, I've missed it.

>> Have you ever read the philosophical works of Ruth Garrett Millikan?
>
>No, but the name sounds very familiar. Is her work similar to that of
>Quine?

Well, right now I am very, very high on Prof. Millikan. While there might be people who would say that they both advocate forms of philosophical naturalism, this is mostly a minimal commonality to twentieth century thinkers, a scientific worldview of one flavor or another. The value in her work, for me, is where she goes well beyond Quine in advocating a form of ontological realism, somewhat out of fashion (by several centuries), and locates all of her issues in something which is not quite epistomology, either. Where's that darn book? There are biological, evolutionary, and psychological aspects to her writing. It is not an easy read, because, for some reason, what are really simple ideas just do not seem to present themselves easily -- the older (and wrong!) ideas are too well established in our education and language.

I would say that she does not need to commit to ontological realism, btw, her theories could work as well in any case.

>Thanks for the pointer, but I won't make promises because I have this
>big stack of books that I still have to read first.

Oh yeah, me too, but right now, I'm saying, this ain't just another book (and actually, she's been writing this stuff since 1984 or earlier, but I'm just getting on board myself right now!).

>Well, I wonder if that is really meaningful. How can I tell if objects
>are different if I do not know any property or relationship
>that it has with other objects?

How can you compare two objects, if you don't have their identities separate before hand? Classic relational theory puts the "identity" into the primary key, as an overload of their meaningful values. Why should this overload be a valid construction, or at least why should it be a necessary one, or at least, why shouldn't relational be mappable to an object-based structure in which these functions are kept separate?

Joshua Stern
JRStern_at_gte.net Received on Thu Feb 22 2001 - 19:40:18 CET