Re: Ideas for World Hierarchy Example

> > Marshall: Almost none of the data is encoded in a way a machine can do any useful semantic processing on it.

> Dawn: when you click on words in a wiki, similar to "clicking" on a foreign key value within a database (an actual instance of a database), you navigate to another node (called a "document", think "record") that is set up as a tree (specified in xhtml, for example) with more foreign key values found by which you can find more documents (records). A wiki is a web. It can be modeled as a digraph with trees on the nodes. This is pretty much the model for many databases that are not RDBMS's by design (e.g. UniData, UniVerse, OpenQM, Revelation, jBASE, D3, Cache', UniVision)

Would it be fair to say that RMDBs offer a higher degree of systematicness but less flexibility? And that di-graph based db (ie UniData, etc) offer a higher degree of flexibility but less systematicness? And each is a better fit for different types of applications?

> > T_City (id, name)
> > T_Country (id, city, capital,
> > official_cap, admin_cap, leg_cap, jud_cap, defacto_cap)
> > How do I get rid of all those NULLs?
>
> ... don't worry about the nulls with this model

Ok, I can let the NULLs slide, but what was worrying me more is data redundancy and not systematically storing some relationships. For example, captial is redundant. And the relationship between modifiers (ie official, admin, ... ) and captial is not stored in a tuple/attribute/value manner. I know I need to break T_Country into more tables but I can' t figure out into which ones exactly. Received on Fri Jan 12 2007 - 02:36:35 CET