I heard the sad news about Robert Pirsig passing.
His book : Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance was a big influence on me and piqued my interest in philosophy.
While writing the book his day job was writing computer manuals.
About 15 years ago, I wrote an article for ITWorld about data modelling with XML called Zen and the art of motorcycle manuals, inspired in part by Pirsig's book and his meditations on how the qualities in objects such as motorcycles are more than just the sum of the parts that make up the motorcycle.
So it is with data modelling. For any given modelling problem there are many ways to do it that are all "correct" at some level. Endlessly seeking to bottom out the search and find the "correct" model is a pointless exercise. At the end of the day "correctness" for any data model is not a function of the data itself. It is a function of what you are planning to do with the data.
This makes some folks uncomfortable. Especially proponents of top-down software development methodologies who like to conceptualize analysis as an activity that starts and ends before any prototyping/coding begins.
Maybe somewhere out there Robert Pirsig is talking with Bill Kent - author of another big influence on my thinking : Data and Reality.
Maybe they are discussing how best to model a bishop :-)
1 comment:
This is fantastic. Yes, Zen was a seminal work for me too - and was really my first exposure to a lifelong fascination with Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and how this translates into contemporary thought and philosophy. I've noticed that most of the people who've ended up in the modeling/ontology space tend to be Western Taoists of one form or another.
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