Path: text.usenetserver.com!out04b.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!in02.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!postnews.google.com!news2.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!nx01.iad01.newshosting.com!newshosting.com!post01.iad01!news.aliant.net!not-for-mail Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:57:13 -0400 From: Bob Badour User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: Another view on analysis and ER References: <217b9$475842ea$839b4533$21800@news1.tudelft.nl> <5e866$4760384a$839b4533$32042@news1.tudelft.nl> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 36 Message-ID: <47604b2c$0$5294$9a566e8b@news.aliant.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 142.176.114.141 X-Complaints-To: abuse@aliant.net Xref: usenetserver.com comp.databases.theory:168072 X-Received-Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:57:17 EST (text.usenetserver.com) David Cressey wrote: > "rpost" wrote in message > news:5e866$4760384a$839b4533$32042@news1.tudelft.nl... > >>Jon Heggland wrote: >> >>[...] >> >>>Straw man. I don't believe I've said anything in general about the >>>qualities of graphical languages versus textual. I merely observed that >>>this guy's assumption that analysis = data modeling = drawing something >>>is dubious. >> >>I agree. I wasn't attacking you. However I believe it is just as > > relevant > >>to notice that many formally inclined computer scientists work with an >>(often tacit) assumption that anything graphical is inherently inexact, >>informal, merely illustrative in nature. > > A diagram does essentially the same thing that a model does: it omits or > glosses over some presumably unimportant details, in order to highlight > certain features of the thing being modeled. Many of the harshest critcisms > of diagrams that I've read in this newsgroup are based on the idea that a > good model ought to serve as a blueprint. > > Some models serve as blueprints. Some don't. Diagrams generally are not > detailed enough to erve as blueprints. But they are useful communication > tools, nevertheless. My objections to pretty pictures have nothing to do with whether the pretty pictures can serve as blueprints. Pretty pictures are fraught with pitfalls often leading to mistakes or to otherwise avoidable case analyses.