11 Common Web Use Cases Solved in Redis
From the webpage:
In How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack Salvatore ‘antirez’ Sanfilippo shows how to solve some common problems in Redis by taking advantage of its unique data structure handling capabilities. Common Redis primitives like LPUSH, and LTRIM, and LREM are used to accomplish tasks programmers need to get done, but that can be hard or slow in more traditional stores. A very useful and practical article. How would you accomplish these tasks in your framework?
Good post about Redis and common web use cases.
Occurs to me that I don’t have a similar list for topic maps (whatever software you use) as a technology.
Sure, topic map apply when you need to have a common locus for information about a subject or need better modeling of relationships, but that’s all rather vague and hand-wavy.
Here are two examples that are more concrete:
The small office supply store on the town square (this is a true story) had its own internal inventory system with numbers, etc. The small store ordered from several larger suppliers, who all had their own names and internal numbers for the same items. A stable mapping wasn’t an option because the numbers used both by the large suppliers (as well as the descriptions) and the manufacturers were subject to change and reuse.
The small office supply store could see the value in a topic map but the cost in employee time to match up the inventory numbers was less than construction and maintenance of a topic map on top of their internal system. I would say that dynamic inventory control is a topic maps use case.
The other use case involves medical terminology. A doctor I know covers the hospital for an entire local medical practice. He isn’t a specialist in any of the fields covered by the practice so he has to look up the latest medical advances in several fields. Like all of us, he has terms that he learned in for particular conditions, which aren’t the ones in the medical databases. So he has trouble searching from time to time.
He recognized the value of a topic map being able to create a mapping between his terminology and the terminology used by the medical database. It would enable him to search more quickly and effectively. Unfortunately the problem, in these economic times, isn’t pinching enough to result in a project. Personalized search interfaces are another topic map use case.
What’s yours?