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Subject:Re: Mapping, take II From:Gwen Thomas <gthomas -at- PAYSYS -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 29 Jun 1999 15:23:42 -0500
Mark Baker wrote (in what I hope he will turn into a formal White Paper:
"Effective single sourcing depends on keeping and managing all the
interesting relationships in your information set in order to give yourself
many options for creating different syntheses of information for different
purposes."
Darn, I wish I'd said that.
And earlier, Mark wrote:
"The best way to manage relationships is to manage those
properties which form the basis of relationships, making the relationship
explicit is less effective because it does not hold out the possibility of
discovering new relationships based on the properties of other objects."
Mark,
I follow (and wholeheartedly agree with) the first part. Then I'm not sure I follow. I usually tried to find implicit links and, if I was building a database, use the related data (or a surrogate) as primary/foreign keys. What do mean by "making the relationship explicit" - are you referring to dropping hypertext links into language strings? Do you mean that by using something which can be arbiitrary (as a hyperlink can sometimes be) that we've now made an implicit relationship explicit?
Gwen Thomas
Knowledge Management Consultant
CIBER Information Services
