Re: The stupidest design I ever saw

Neo wrote:
> > No, you first please demonstrate that the above classification serves
> > some useful purpose.
>
> It may serve the purpose of allowing a large car dealership to narrow
> down the list of vehicles to offer based on a general category
> specified by a customer (ie mini-van, economy, economy/luxury,
> utility/hybrid, etc).

Just an attribute/column would suffice.

> > Bruce Jacobs advocates that classification system for data management
> > problems is a poor solution in general.
>
> While I accept that implementation by a particular methodology may have
> limitations or problems (ie as in multiple inheritance in OOP), are you
> saying that classification, by itself, is a poor solution to data
> management? If so, why would human being rely on it so much? For
> example, if someone tells me thing X is a helicopter, it allows me to
> infer many characteristics. Next, if they tell me it is also a jet, it
> allow me to infer additional prominent characteristics and doubts some
> of the minor ones. For instance, I can now assume that it not only
> hovers but flies very fast, but less certain about it's cockpit/cabin
> environment. After learning more details, I might classify thing X
> predominantly in a new class (ie UFO?) but still keep it as a minor one
> in the old ones. I agree that various classes should not be arranged in
> a hierarchy (as in the earlier XML/RDF example) and that each thing
> simply belongs to 0 to many classes. In addition, human's data
> management system probably include weighting factors as to how strongly
> a thing belongs in a particular class and also for properties and
> methods associated with a class.

IMO the formal concept analysis folks nailed the right approach to categorization theory. There are two sets: formal objects and formal attributes. Check up the "Formal Concept Analysis in Information Science" article by Uta Priss -- it is written for general audience. Received on Fri Apr 07 2006 - 00:31:30 CEST