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[John Cowan] >What I must understand to do what I want with a document has nothing to do with what you must >understand to do what you want. And perhaps neither of us have purposes that were foreseen by the publisher. Amen. To paraphrase the Bard of Avon, structure is in the eye of the beholder. I had the good fortune early in my career to be exposed to Jackson Structured Programming[1]. With Jackson, you create a *brand new data model* every time to sit down to process some data. The data model chosen as the input data structure is rarely the schema used by the creator of the data. Rather, it is a supervenient data model that can be mapped to the data, but it completely distinct from the data. Not only is it not *in* the original data, its not even in the local institutions view of the data. It is literally, problem specific. A developer might have a dozen different input data structures for the same data set for a dozen different applications. Jackson goes on to take the same approach on the output-side, but that's another story:-) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_structured_programming -- Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon Inc. http://www.propylon.com http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com @propylonsean This E-Mail is for the use of the intended addressee. If you are not the intended addressee, or the person responsible for delivering it to the intended addressee, you may not copy, forward, disclose or otherwise use it or any part of it in any way whatsoever. To do so is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you receive this E-Mail by mistake, please advise the sender immediately by using the REPLY facility in your E-Mail software and delete all associated material immediately. |