Re: the distinction between data and intelligence

mountain man wrote:
>
> Otherwise, how would you define the distinction
> between data and intelligence (for the purposes
> of database theory only budding philosophers!)?

How about calling code stored as data in the database simply "code stored as data in the database"? :-)

> Or, is such a distinction of little consequence?

Distinguishing normal data from code that is stored in the DBMS is certainly important. In fact, there has already been some theoretical resarch on what consequences this might have. There was already in 1984 an article by Stonebraker et al. on "QUEL as a data type": (QUEL being a query language.)

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=602287

More recently there has been research on issues related to storing code as if it were data and which consequences that might have for the query language. (There's no point in storing something if you cannot query it.) To name a few:

J. Van den Bussche, D. Van Gucht, and G. Vossen. Reflective programming in the relational algebra. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 52(3):537--549, June 1996.

S. Abiteboul, C.H. Papadimitriou, and V.Vianu. The power of the reflective relational machine. In Proceedings IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pp. 230--240, Paris, France (1994).

Towards practical meta-querying
Authors: Bussche, Jan Van den; Vansummeren, Stijn; Vossen, Gottfried http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:arXiv.org:cs/0202037

Not that this directly connects to what you are talking about, but it shows that the idea has already popped up before and is recognized as relevant and interesting.

• Jan Hidders