I describe Perl data structures because I am able to wrap hashes around my entities. I try to represent them in a db because that is the first thing that comes to mind for persistent storage and rapid retrieval.

In my OP, I have only described People. I could have entities that are Organizations, and either of these entities could have a multitude of properties. One of the key properties would be the relationship of these entitites to each other. So, a person (with its bundle of properties) could "works_at" an organization that "works_with" another organization that "employs" another person who is "married_to" another person who "works_at" the first organization, ad infinitum. The more I stare at this, the more it says, we are "RDF Triples." I want to semantically describe the agents and agencies in a community (of such agents and agencies), and I want to do so in a machine recognizable way.

The rdbms is great for structured data, but fails miserably for open-ended, free-floating data structures such as this (I often wonder why an rdbms data store wasn't chosen for the ical reference).

I am just starting to walk on this road, by I need the wisdom of monks to guide me as I start.

--

when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed

In reply to Re^2: modeling relationships by punkish
in thread modeling relationships by punkish

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.