There will always be some bizarre cases that don't fit a simple schema, but this is a good start. I also don't like tables which require two words for their name: I prefer a schema that conforms to one table, one noun.

Here are some ideas to extend it:

I would propose the term 'player' for anyone or anything that could act out a performance. Thus s/people/players/. Even inanimate objects and other non-people may be players; think "Cujo" or "Otto Pilot as himself" for easy examples.

I would propose a table 'episodes' to capture multiple titles that are intended to be seen as continuations or illuminations on a single world. Thus, Star Wars has six canonical episodes, while Star Trek has a much larger number in its canon.

There are many cases where a single character is portrayed by many different players, either as different versions of the character ("young Indiana Jones") or different components of the character ("voice of Tweaky"). I propose to refer to these, if you want to track them separately, as 'aspects' of a single character. The simplest and most common is when a single player plays 'all' aspects throughout the episode.

A single player may perform more than one aspect and more than one character, too. Michael J Fox often plays at least two aspects of Marty McFly at once, as well as his daughter, his son, and his multiply-great-grandfather.

I would propose that a 'role' is the conjunction of 'player' vs 'character' vs 'aspect' vs 'episode'. So s/people_characters/roles/. James Earl Jones was the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars through episodes SW4, SW5 and SW6. That's three roles by my count.

For more ideas, browse the IMDb.com site for a while and see if you can reverse engineer their tables.

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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

In reply to Re: 2Re: Normalisation Question (OT but trust me, perl implementation) by halley
in thread Normalisation Question (OT but trust me, perl implementation) by Cody Pendant

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