Grahame Grieve wrote: > > > oh? what's a real thing? I don't think these things are any less > real than other things, just that the business environment dictated > that IT requirements came first a thousand years ago. > > I am of course being somewhat loose here, but I mean anything that exists in the natural world that isn't a pure construct of the human mind - biological and physical structures, disease processes for example. And many humanly constructed informational entities whose form follows the complexity of the things they report, e.g. clinical information, hotel booking information (in its modern form - consider a site like Expedia). Accounting data in its classical form is a pure mathematical abstraction, and doesn't have much of a connection to the human world the way clinical information does.
All I am saying here is that attempts to model anything from this real world where things are complex and change without control directly as an ER model is likely to doom the system to unmaintainability in a few years. - thomas
