Slide 13

CSCI 201 Guest Lecture: Data Modeling

Conclusion

Data models can be as varied as human thought. The famous CYC project, still ongoing after 12 years, has the ambitious goal of capturing all of human conceptualization:


The top level CYC ontology.
From "The State of the Art in Ontology Design," AI Magazine, Fall 1997
Copyright 1997 by AAAI. Fair use.

The tangled hierarchy of the ontology above is a set of concepts connected by inheritance relationships. The top object is the set of all concepts.

Data modeling is good because it:

  • Simplifies the problem domain
  • Facilitates collaboration among many programmers

    • A good data model:

  • Eliminates irrelevant information
  • Is easily extensible
  • Maps easily to code

    • The object model does these things for a broad spectrum of problem domains. For an example of a Java applet using the object model for a geometry application, see my FixtureNet applet. Its object model is fully documented.

    Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools allow the automatic mapping of object models to code.

    Exercise
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    Email: Richard dot J dot Wagner at gmail dot com

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