Books that Influenced my Thinking: Kent’s Data and Reality by Thomas Redman.
From the post:
It was the rumor that Steve Hoberman (Technics Publications) planned to reissue Data and Reality by William Kent that led me to use this space to review books that had influenced my thinking about data and data quality. My plan had been to do the review of Data and Reality as soon as it came out. I completely missed the boat – it has been out for some six months.
I first read Data and Reality as we struggled at Bell Labs to develop a definition of data that would prove useful for data quality. While I knew philosophers had debated the merits of various approaches for thousands of years, I still thought “how hard can this be?” About twenty minutes with Kent’s book convinced me. This is really tough.
….
Amazon reports Data and Reality (3rd edition) as 200 pages long.
Looking at a hard copy I see:
- Prefaces 17-34
- Chapter 1 Entities 35-54
- Chapter 2 The Nature of an Information System 55-67
- Chapter 3 Naming 69-86
- Chapter 4 Relationships 87-98
- Chapter 5 Attributes 99-107
- Chapter 6 Types and Categories and Sets 109-117
- Chapter 7 Models 119-123
- Chapter 8 The Record Model 125-137
- Chapter 9 Philosophy 139-150
- Bibliography 151-159
- Index 161-162
Way less than the 200 pages promised by Amazon.
To ask a slightly different question:
“How hard can it be” to teach building data models?
A hard problem with no fixed solution?
Suggestions?