On Jul 2, 2007, at 4:37 PM, Martha Yee wrote:
Can anyone on this list point us to working entity-relationship model applications accessible over the web in which we can see one entity being used in the user-readable string that identifies another entity in all displays (both lists and single record displays)? Can one entity (e.g., work) be searched using variant names of two entities (e.g., work and author)?
As a software engineer with a computer science degree, I would stake anything I have to stake on the assurance that "one entity being used in the user-readable string that identifies another entity" is _quite_ an ordinary thing to do. But I'm having trouble coming up with good real-world examples. Perhaps partially because in real world examples we don't always know exactly what the underlying data model is, neccesarily. Perhaps because it's in fact such a common situation. I will look for a good example. But the (literally) textbook basic hypothetical example for teaching Entity-Relationship Modelling is Employees and Departments. Both are entities, each employee has one department, each department has many employees. (As a textbook starting example; of course it would also be possible to model a situation where each Employee can have 1 to N Departments). When developing such a 'hypothetical' example application for classes, I and many other students have made applications where listings of Employees show their Departments right next to the Employee name (in whatever screen formatting or composition the designer might want), and an Employee record detail page shows you the Department that Employee belongs to, and likewise a Department record detail page shows you all of it's Employees. This is quite a common situation. Works and Authors are no different, in regard to an Entity-Relational model being _quite_ capable of modelling this, and certainly allowing "one entity to be used in the user-readable string that identifies another entity", for any related entities (so long as this relationship is modelled), on any screen at all. I personally indeed like very much the set-theoretical approach to the bibliographic entities that Martha Yee has promulgated. I do not think it is _one bit_ incompatible with the Entity-Relational model of FRBR. I do think the narrative of FRBR would benefit by explaining the set theoretical nature of the relationships, it would make it much easier to understand what they are for the new reader. But these set-theoretical relationships can still be modelled by an entity-relational model--in fact, in my opinion, that's exactly what the FRBR entity-relational model is modelling. Jonathan
We need a model that recognizes that many works important to our users are identified by BOTH their authors and their titles. We need a model that recognizes that the author is more important as an attribute of a work than as an entity in its own right. Catalogs are bibliographical tools, not biographical tools. Martha M. Yee [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sara Shatford Layne [EMAIL PROTECTED]
