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bob@objfac.com (Bob Foster) writes:
>[Much excellence about family relationships changing over time.]
>
>The point about relationships being neither homogeneous nor stable
>over time, in either number or type, nor universally applicable, has
>been well made by William Kent, e.g., in his classic "Limitations of
>Record-Based Information Models" ACM TODS paper. Many of Kent's
>examples are cases where relationships change to meet business needs,
>e.g., cars can be leased to departments as well as individual drivers,
>which are changes in business practice.
I also very strongly recommend Kent's book _Data and Reality_. His
keynote at Extreme Markup Languages was excellent, though really just a
taste of the work he does, and _Data and Reality_ is an excellent tour
through these kinds of problems.
There are folks who dismiss these kinds of questions as merely
philosophical, but Kent makes them extremely concrete. The book is
twenty plus years old, and still utterly relevant.
>I agree with the other points you made, but I hate to see you concede
>this one.
Fair enough - I didn't feel I conceded that much, but maybe it's better
not to concede at all.
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