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About Michael Gorman


  • Richord1

    Excellent article. If data modelers and software programmers spent a bit of time understanding data and data models as outlined in the article we would have robust designs. Like the challenge architects face, transforming concepts from the minds of people into data requires more than technical knowledge. Our current techniques focus primarily on the technical aspects of the design of data, ignoring the human factors such as values and behaviors that impact the design and the outcomes.
    Mapping the human concepts of data to their technical representation using semantics is a critical technique. Data models reduce the ambiguity of data and in doing so impose an artificial representation on the data that reduces the fidelity of the data from a human perspective. Through the data model transformation process, concepts are transformed and in some cases eliminated. The concept of a person becomes a digital persona through data modeling transformation. What is important is to understand what is “lost in transformation”.

  • Juraj Pivovarov

    People, myself included, keep asking “what exactly do you mean by conceptual model? Logical model?” I like this article that it attempts to formalize what “things”, and at what detail, are present at each level. It’s nice to get an appropriate grammar for each level of abstraction.

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