Path: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu!spool.maxwell.syr.edu!drn.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!canoe.uoregon.edu!frgp!feed.news.qwest.net!news.uswest.net.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Dan User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0+ (Windows/20050524) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: Object-Role Modeling? References: <1120593464.843425.65810@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 51 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:14:13 -0500 NNTP-Posting-Host: 208.44.131.165 X-Trace: news.uswest.net 1121357651 208.44.131.165 (Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:14:11 CDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:14:11 CDT Xref: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu comp.databases.theory:32271 On 7/14/2005 2:01 AM, Ken North wrote: > "Mikito Harakiri" wrote in message > news:1120593464.843425.65810@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... > >>Dan wrote: >> >>>As a way to describe a problem domain with end users, why hasn't ORM >>>taken off? From what I have read of it, it seems that it would be the >>>place to start, then tweak on ER layer... >> >>Maybe because ORM/ER were never sucessful as comunnication tool with >>end users? For that matter, were ORM/ER sucessful in anything else? > > > > Comparison of UML and ORM for data modeling (as opposed to application object > modeling): > www.orm.net/pdf/JDM99.pdf > > From an article by Alan Kotok about modeling for an HR system for 4 million > employees: > http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/12/12/kotok.html?page=2 > > "UML advocates got an even sharper shock when one of the key developers of > HR-XML spoke at length about the inability of UML to meet the needs of a > large-scale human resources systems project undertaken by the U.S. Department of > Defense. Enrique Kortright, of the U.S. Navy Space and Warfare Command's > Information Technology Center, discussed how the initial modeling of the planned > Defense Integrated Human Resources System (DIMHRS) ran into problems using UML. > This project is a large, complex undertaking, eventually serving 3 to 4 million > employees, with thousands of entry points and concurrent users, and exchanging > data with finance, education, health care, retirement, and civilian personnel > systems. > > Kortright said the goal of modeling this system was to capture the business > knowledge of human resource professionals, and like Bob Sutor of IBM, he had to > evaluate the available standards against the needs of that project. However, he > found UML limited in its ability to record complex business behavior. Based on > this experience, he said UML was both too complex and too restrictive and forced > the modelers to make decisions irrelevant to the overall goals of the project, > such as classifying professional human resources knowledge between classes and > attributes. Kortright also discovered that human resources experts could not > understand the UML notation. The DIMHRS designers ended up using another > graphical modeling language called Object Role Modeling, which like UML uses a > graphical notation but is more expressive." > > I think we all know that most software projects end in failure. I wonder how much of this failure is due to a poor database design which was a result of an impedance mismatch between modeler and end user.