Re: Ideas for World Hierarchy Example

dawn wrote:

> Neo wrote:
> > > > 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?
>
> With the implementations of each model (intended model, no
> implementation is perfect), it would be fair to say that there are more
> constraints built into the dbms in the case of the RDBMS and more
> flexiibility with the di-graph.

[snip]

It would be even fairer to say that a di-graph model cannot model n-ary relationships, whereas RMDB's can (although they are not the only possible n-ary model). And fairer too to say that a binary model is necessarily a weak subset of an n-ary model (e.g. hypergraphs).

I cannot understand why with 40 years of research, papers, and practical illustrations such as the replacement of navigational databases, and now clear failure of the Semantic Web's di-graph data model, people are insistent on trying to reinvent flawed graph-based systems.

Its almost as though there is a concious disrespect in some parts of the community to the years of effort, hard work and diligence of those who preceded us. Received on Fri Jan 12 2007 - 07:32:17 CST