Re: "thou shalt not conflate meta-data with data"

On 3 Mar 2005 15:38:07 -0800, Neo wrote:

>> Please read my previous post. If I know the context, I can easily
>distinguish data from metadata. If I don't know the context, I can't.
>
>That context is "data that imposes some condition (structure,
>constraints, significance, etc) upon other data"

Hi Neo,

That's not what I meant with context. What kind of application? Who uses it and what does he/she do with it?

> which is similar to
>your statement "the derivation rule and the constraint are metadata"

You're taking my statement severly out of context. What I wrote was:

>>In the context of a personnel administration database
(snip)
>>the derivation rule and the constraint are metadata.

(and this refers to a specific derivation rule and a specific constraint that were introduced in the part I snipped).

In the context of a software engineer working at Oracle on the next version of the Oracle DBMS, a specific constraint imposed on a table in his test set would be data, not meta data. But in the same context, another constraint (e.g. the constraint that says that primary key columns may never allow nulls) would be meta-data.

(snip)
> Can you refinement it?

I can only repeat what I wrote in a previous message:

One method that usually works for me is to ask myself who would be dealing on a daily basis with the data. If it's the end user, it's data; if it's the developer, it's metadata.

Best, Hugo

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