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.