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

Neo wrote:
> When modeling "John is a person & John is male & male is a gender" as
> shown below, which data is meta data? Which data "step[s] outside the
> language to talk about the language itself" ?
>
> T_Gender
> ID Name
> 1 Male
> 2 Female
>
> T_Person
> ID Name Gender
> 3 John Male(1)
> 4 Mary Female(2)

the data are the propositions:

"John is male"
"Mary is female"
"Male is a gender"
"Female is a gender".

these proposition are grouped into predicates: "person P has gender G"
"G is a gender"

the meta-data would be things like "gender G is of varchar(10) type" or "the table representing the predicate 'person P has gender G' is called T_Person". Because if you're inside the model, these things are irrelevant. It's like the people inside the Matrix wondering what variable names are used to refer to them or something.

This is from a relational database point of view, I guess you could have a system where both the things above are considered just as "data". As I said before, the terms "data" and "meta-data" are defined only within the context of a system, so you can't give an absolute answer.

Paul. Received on Thu Mar 03 2005 - 00:07:32 CET