Construction Zone

Start building your data-verse

Getting Started:

Before you start creating relations or links, you need things to relate or link. So begin by thinking about all the things that are important in your domain and all the properties they have. Remember that you are working at a level of abstraction: you want to create the types of things. As you think through all the moving pieces and you come across a specific thing in mind that you know matters, think about a functional category that best captures it. So color instead of red, status instead of completed.

The category-of-object creator asks for singular and plural forms, to make various queries and reports grammatical. I would like to be able to auto-generate these, but... stupid irregular English! If you care less about such things, you could edit the doc and remove those things.

Once you have at least two categories of objects, you can add a relation between them. The relation creation process asks (initially) for four things - basically, the verbs/phrases that link them in both directions, and with singular and plural objects. (Again, English is stupid!) If you can make them specific, that is good. If they are generic, that is fine too. You do not have to have unique words to describe relations - they are defined between the two specified categories, not by the words. You will quite likely have a lot of “has/had/is had by/are had by,” and that is okay.

You can make your description of the relations richer using the... relationship enricher. This will offer you options to configure some of the finer details of the relation that may be important to the design of your tables and data structure. You only need to add as much detail as you wish.

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So let’s get started! Data entry is set up with forms:

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Create:

If it helps for the singular/plural forms, think “One ........”, “Many .......”

Create a Category of Objects:

Create a Category of Objects:

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For relations, there are hints in the relations form to help you think through what is required. Unfortunately they have to look like fields on the form - only fill out the lines with stars! You are not necessarily looking for a single word - “is owned by,” “has an owner of” and so on are more descriptive and will work fine. Once you are comfortable with the logic, you could remove the hints and make the form much smaller.

Create a Relation between Categories of Objects:

Create a Relation between Categories of Objects:

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Current summary:

Select categories:

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Relation Enricher

It is often important to know more than just that two categories are related: often, the best way to structure a doc and the underlying tables, depends on the details of relation between things. In particular, it often depends on how many can be related to how many. The relation enricher gives you an ordinary-language way to add these kinds of constraints to your data-verse. Just select the categories and condition from the drop-downs, and enter a number. (Note: the way this is set up, if you add any new constraints they will overwrite previous constraints. So if there is a conflict between details in the archive, the most recent is operative. If you are not sure, you can go directly to the relation table and edit the min/max values.)

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Add a constraint to a Relation

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Quantifier

Category 1

Verb

Condition

Number

Category 2

Button

There are no rows in this table

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Relation Details (archive)

Relation Details (archive)

There are no rows in this table

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View Data-verse:

There are a number of ways you can view the categories and relations. I hope to build out more, but for now what we have is a LaTeX-generated view and a sentence view:

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