Re: RM's Canonical database

Bob Badour wrote:
> Dan wrote:
>
> > Frans Bouma wrote:
> >
> >>Bob Badour wrote:
> >>
> >>>Ron Jeffries wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>On Sat, 01 Jul 2006 11:27:17 +0200, mAsterdam
> >>>><mAsterdam_at_vrijdag.org> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>>Robert Martin wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>... business rules don't belong in the database.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>What, in your opinion, does belong in the database?
> >>>>
> >>>>Uh ... data?
> >>>
> >>>'Data' is information represented suitably for machine processing. In
> >>>what way are business rules not information or not represented
> >>>suitably for machine processing?
> >>
> >> Bob, are you now suggesting that you don't know the difference between
> >>data and information? No don't bother looking up a Dijkstra quote on
> >>that.
> >>
> >> FB
>
> Here is further evidence that Frans is a self-aggrandizing ignorant. My
> statement above indicates that I fully understand the difference between
> data and information as far as computing and information technology are
> concerned. In fact, my sentence above basically restates the definitions
> for 'information' and 'data' available from ISO/IEC 2382-01 Standard
> Vocabulary for Information Technology.
>
> If I recall correctly, information and data are definitions 2382-01.01
> and 2382-01.02 in that standard. In other words, in the view of the
> folks who created the standard, they are the two most fundamental
> definitions in our profession.

This is but two of the definitions used for data and information in the computing sciences. For example, a book I have, called "Information Technology - Inside and Out", by Cyganzski, Orr, and Vaz, use the definition of 'information' as:

"Knowledge communicated or received concerning some fact or circumstance; news..".

They go on to state that the "world is full of facts, some discovered and some remaining to be discovered. These become information when they are used in some way. This is the fundamental connection between information and communication: a fact only becomes a useful as information when it is communicated."

One could summarize these authors' distinctions between data and information as to whether or not it is communicable and received correctly, implying a process of encoding, transport, and interpretation by a receiver, whether human or non-human.

This is very similar to the vein of information theory.

> >
> > Business rules as logic can be represented symbolically, just as a
> > natural language would do less efficiently, and then have manipulations
> > of them mechanized by a computing system, just as facts as true
> > prepositions are. Why would the distinction between information and
> > data come into play here?
>
> It comes into play as soon as one formally specifies a business rule in
> a form suitable for machine processing. Before that moment, it is
> information but not data. After that moment, it is both.

I don't find this distinction as useful as others might, though I won't argue the fact that they might be entirely valid when stated as a definition within some well defined context. It's just not the only definition, and I find others more useful.

A theoritical treatise written originally in French might be full of information, but to me it does not constitute much information that is "processable" at all. By the same token, a table in a document might contain data as facts, but not be necessarily in a 'digitized' form nor processable by a computing processor. Your definition of data would exclude this as data and classify it only as information, but other definitions, including many dictionaries, would define those facts as data.

• Dan