Re: A rant about the terminology debate

I cant help observing that the potential for terminology confusion increases exponentially when we have many terminologies to try to get aligned. Maybe trying to get analogies with DBMS is a losing game. Especially when we all agree that the analogy is imperfect in any case. 

Pat

On Aug 24, 2012, at 12:45 PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:

> 
> On 08/24/2012 12:09 PM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>> On 08/24/2012 07:32 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> 
>>> [...]
> 
>>> Sandro,
>>> 
>>> How would you map g-box, g-snap, and g-text in formal relational DBMS terminology? Such a mapping would help many. Basically, mapping to relations, sets of tuples, and notation.
>>> 
>> 
>> I'm not really fluent in RDBMS theory terminology.   I do know the terminology database app developers use, though, I think -- the kind of stuff you find in the Oracle or MySQL manuals (talking about "tables" instead of "relations").   In that terminology, I'd say:
>> 
>>  g-box: table (or view)
>>  g-snap: dump of a table (or view)
>>  g-snap: not something one normally deals with; either:
>>      - a state of a table; or
>>      - a value which is the set of all the rows in a table.
>> 
>> This is more of an analogy than a real correspondence, since a table row is not the same thing as an RDF triple, in general. (You could make a Subject/Property/Value table, but the data typing of the value wouldn't work right, in general.)
>> 
>>    -- Sandro
> 
> I don't see how a g-box can be a table, as a table is only a potentially small part of a database.
> 
> I think that perhaps the mapping to informal usage is:
> 
> g-box: database
> g-snap: database
> g-text: not used much as databases aren't often moved around, perhaps database dump, but that's not really very correct
> 
> peter
> 
> 
> 
> 

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Received on Friday, 24 August 2012 17:53:37 UTC