modelling entities and the history of ideas

Posted on March 6, 2008 by alan

A few weeks ago I was watching my friend Nad and some of his colleagues map out the key semantic entities for a domain ready for creating an open repository on the Talis Platform. Then this morning, by chance, I just came across an entry in the Portland Pattern Repository on “Stars: A Pattern Language for Query Optimized Schema”¹. This described a form of entity relationship modelling where one identifies “while business entities” (key business things like transactions) and then ‘dimensions’ that relate to them looking specifically for “people, places and things” … and time as a special case. The idea is that information about, say, a product, a customer or a salesperson tends to be scattered in different tables, linked at best implicitly by shared values (e.g. , a product code.) which may not actually be the key to any specifoc table. By giving these key entities their own tables, the linkage between them becomes obvious and queries are easy to form.

This sounded just like the focus in Semantic Web ontologies on having a shared set of classes and a unique identifier for entities in those classes to enable “linked data”. In SemWeb we have a class and the entity URI, but serving the same goal as the table and row key did in the “Stars” pattern, more than a decade ago.

However, this then reminded me again of the similarities between current ontologies and Extended Entity Relationship Models which were popular at least 20 years ago (I recall colleagues at York using this in the Aspect IPSE project² in the Alvey programme). There were variants of EERM, but key concepts were (like standard ER) to have relationships explicitly defined – usually in tables containing ONLY foreign keys, and (unlike standard ER) to allow sub-typing/sub-classes (e.g. person > employee > academic). Like Semantic Web ontologies, the relationships were reified into tables and became first class, unlike SemWeb, ternary and higher order relationships were allowed, not just binary ones.

I was half way through writing Nad a mail with the Stars link, and was referring to the EERM and did a Google to find the correct acronym … and then that mail turned into this blog, partly because it was getting long and partly because it was so hard to find good references to EERM. There was no Wikipedia page, minimal entries in a few online dictionaries and even hard to find good paper references. The best link seems to be a 1994 book by Martin Gogolla³, but that was at least 8 years after I knew it was popular, but I guess when it had become stable. A bit more Googling unearthed a 1986 Computer Surveys article⁴ (whch I could NOT find using “extended entity-relationship model” in ACM DL’s own search) and eventually a 1981 paper⁵, although I’m not sure the latter uses the term in the same way as later EERM.

It was interesting and alarming to find, yet again, how difficult it is to find certain things in the web even in computing… like anything that happened more than 10 years ago! Some of this is to do with effective searching (like the ACM DL search), some because it is not there. However, as we rely more and more on online search, the recency effects produced by combinations of search ranking and availability can only get worse. This feels more like the attributes of pre-literate culture … the new digital stone age?

also reported in: Peterson, S. 1995. Stars: a pattern language for query-optimized schemas. In Pattern Languages of Program Design, J. O. Coplien and D. C. Schmidt, Eds. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 163-177. [entry@ACM DL][back]
Hitchcock, P. 1989. The process model of the aspect IPSE. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 14, 4 (May. 1989), 76-78. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/75111.75120[back]
M. Gogolla. An Extended Entity Relationship Model. Fundamentals and Pragmatics. Springer, Berlin, LNCS 767, 1994[back]
Teorey, T. J., Yang, D., and Fry, J. P. 1986. A logical design methodology for relational databases using the extended entity-relationship model. ACM Comput. Surv. 18, 2 (Jun. 1986), 197-222. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/7474.7475[back]
P. De, A. Sen and E. Gudes, An Extended Entity-Relationship Model with Multi Level External Views, in Proceedings of ER’81, North-Holland, 1981, pp. 455-472.[back]

the electronic village shop – update and kit

Posted on March 2, 2008 by alan

I forgot last week when I wrote my post “the electronic village shop – enhancing local community through global network” that Fiona had mentioned a blog, Silversprite, from the Outer Hebrides that mentioned the flip side of this; in a post “Tesco comes to the Outer Hebrides“, he mentions the potential conflicts between Tesco online and village shops. It is interesting that Tesco does not itself deliver direct, but you can give a local delivery firm as your drop off point and they do the last leg of the delivery … of course this delivery point could be the local shop!

I also remembered after that some years ago (2002) I had an email enquiry from someone who had found a reference to the electronic village shop in one of my talks. He was wondering how to revitalise his own village shop which was about to close and asked if I had any advice. The following is edited version of my reply where I pondered on what was possible as a single shop without buy-in from one of the big franchise chains:

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tales from/for Berlin – appropriation, adoption and physicality

Posted on March 2, 2008 by alan

A few weeks ago I had a short visit to Berlin as a guest of Prometei, a PhD training program at the University of Technology of Berlin focused on “prospective engineering of human-technology-interaction”. While there I gave an evening talk on “Designing for adoption and designing for appropriation” and spent a very pleasant afternoon seminar with the students on “Physicality and Interaction”.

I said I would send some links, so this is both a short report on the visit and also a few links to appropriation and adoption and a big long list of links to physicality!

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the electronic village shop – enhancing local community through global network

Posted on February 28, 2008 by alan

The internet seems to be about remote connections, international communities and globalisation. We may surf the web, scan blogs or talk to friends across the globe, but may not know the person next door. Indeed in Channel 4’s recent documentary “My Street“, Sue Bourne, who produces TV documentaries seen by millions, gets to meet her neighbours for the first time.

But there is another side, where global networks could help local communities to grow and reconnect with one another. Some things are happening grass roots up, some need changes in public policy or intervention, and some may never happen.

The electronic village shop is a dream I’ve had for now well over 15 years, and may happen, or may not … and maybe definitely will not if I don’t do something myself! However, there are other signs of local connections growing.

I have talked about these issues and the electronic village shop at different times over the years¹, but have never previouslly written about them, so eventually …
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Talks mentioning the electronic village shop: Understanding the e-Market and Designing Products to Fit, London, Jan. 2000, Cyber-economies and the Real World, Pretoria, Sept. 2001. and Toys for the Boys or Jobs for the Girls, Cheltenham, Nov. 2001[back]

practical RDF

Posted on February 23, 2008 by alan

I just came across D2RQ, a notation (plus implementation) for mapping relational databases to RDF, developed over the last four years by Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and others at Freie UniversitÃ¤t Berlin. In a previous post, “digging ourselves back from the Semantic Web mire“, I worried about the ghetto-like nature of RDF and the need for “abstractions that make non-triple structures more like the Semantic Web”, D2RQ is exactly the sort of thing, allowing existing relational databases to be accessed (but not updated) as if they were and RDF triple stores, including full SPARQL queries.

As D2RQ has clearly been around for years, I tried to do a bit of a web search to find things the other way around – more programmer-friendly layers on top of RDF (or XML) allowing it to be manipulated with IDL-like or other abstractions closer to ‘normal’ programming. ECMAScript for XML (E4X) seems to be just this allowing reasonably easy access to XML (but I guess RDF would be ‘flat’ in this). E4X has been around a few years (standard since 2005), but as far as I can see not yet in IE (surprise!). I guess for really practical XML it would be JSON, and there’s a nice discussion of different RDF in JSON representation issues on the n² wiki “RDF JSON Brainstorming“. However, both E4X and RDF in JSON still are just accessing RDF nicely not adding higher level structure.

Going back to the beginning I was wondering about any tools that represent RDF as SQL / RDMS in order to make it available to ‘old technology’ … but then remembered that SPARQL creates tuples not triples so, I guess, one could say that is exactly what it does :-/

Beyond Reason

Posted on February 8, 2008 by alan

I thought I had stumbled across the web site of an obscure religious cult or maybe just an extreme evangelical sect.

The signs were there. First the changing banner at the top showing images of The LEADER, sometimes looking meaningfully into the distance, sometimes preaching to his devoted disciples, and sometimes staring you directly in the eye convicting you of … you don’t know what but something. Then there was the sidebar densely packed with adverts for books (mostly by The LEADER) including the quotation from the review (by someone you had never heard of) telling you this book would “change the world”. Not to forget the devotional DVDs featuring The LEADER as narrator, or of him talking with others Of Like Mind … a sure sign of these fundamentalist sites when they only discuss with those Of Like Mind.

You need never be fooled, the signs are always obvious – even the address the “Upper Branch” office in California (I assume novitiates start on the Lower Branch) and the inevitable link to a ‘Foundation’ in this case a Foundation for “Reason and Science” – definite shades of Mary Baker Eddy!

The comments at the ends of articles were a little more unusual – it is only the most open cults (or the most confident in their brainwashing) that allow their members voices – but these were not exactly what I expected certainly unmeasured, but with a tone somewhere between MySpace and British National Party … definitely Mid-West Millenialist. About 1 in 7 were even odder with some words I couldn’t make sense of (a form of net-speak?) and even when the words were English the order seemed random and virtually grammarless .. of course, glossolalia … Pentecostal influences. … but most unsettling of all were the images chosen by the contributors as their icons, some I could not even recognise and wonderd if were even legal,

and the site? … RichardDawkins.net (and I feel I ought to pronounce the name in hushed tones), the self professed “clear thinking oasis” … well no false modesty here.

Amongst the top level tabs on the pages are the ‘Store’ (what else) ‘Donate to RDF’ (the Richard Dawkins Foundation silly, not the semantic web notation!) and ‘Science’ and ‘Reason’. Under ‘Science’, we see everything from Archaeology to Psychiatry, Economics and Law .. yes he really is omniscient. Under ‘Reason’ we find less entries: ‘News’, an FAQ and … out of only five content categories … “Religion as Child Abuse” … note not even “Religion and Child Abuse” but “Religion as Child Abuse”. It is good to know that ‘Reason’ has such a staunch defender.

Recently I have been reading “When They Severed Earth From Sky“. The authors, Barber and Barber, describe recurrent patterns in myths across the world – not in a Jungian sense of archetypes, but because we all share a common human nature and cognitive make-up (they subtitle the book “How the Human Mind Shapes Myth”). They mention (p.93) the frequent myth of cannibalism ascribed to one’s enemies citing Arens’ “The Man Eating Myth“, in particular are accusations of abuse against children: the Romans accused the early Christians of infanticide and the Medieaval Christians did the same to the Jews. … it seems Myths die hard and ‘Reason’ can always be helped by a bit of mud slinging.

As an academic I am a little taken aback that a fellow academic would lend his name (or should I say His Name) to a site like this, but I guess every wandering preacher needs to earn a buck … and anyway he is an Oxford professor and I was a Cambridge man so never did trust the other place.

More seriously, for some time I have had a half-written entry about the religious issues of evolution. I use evolutionary arguments frequently in my work, but wish to distance myself from the pseudo-religious evolutionists … maybe soon I’ll finish it.

Significantly (yes this is one of those confession moments), after all my life being a solid Darwinist, there was a period in my mid-twenties when I doubted Evolution (brothers pray for me) … and it was exactly writing like this that made me doubt. If the arguments for evolution were made in this way and those who supported it were so unreasoned, could one trust it at all.

Although mentioning Genesis will I am sure instantly condemn me, I was reminded while looking at this site of the tower of Babel and the people who thought that if they built enough of an edifice they would become like God.

The one redeeming feature on the Dawkins’ site is that amongst the many images of him gazing into the distance, or preaching to the converted is one of a chimpanzee. If you can at least see the funny side of yourself there is some hope.

material culture – textiles and technology

Posted on February 5, 2008 by alan

A couple of weeks ago I was at a ‘Long Table’ discussion on Technology and Democracy at [ space ] in Hackney. The ‘Long Table’ format was led by Lois Weaver (I now note the name although didn’t at the time) and took the form of a simulated dinner art where the participants chatted about the topic. We were invited to write on the table cloth as we posed questions or espoused viewpoints – this later became part of the Not Quite Yet exhibition opening the next day.

Because of the table cloth sitting in front of me I was reminded of the role textiles have played both as significant technology themselves and in the development of technological society. It was the spinning jenny and the cotton mills that created the industrial revolution and it was needle manufacturing that was the inspirations for Adam Smith‘s division of labour. In the context of the discussion of ‘democracy and technology this is particularly poignant. Before the factories spinning and weaving were skilled cottage industries described so well in Silas Marner [G|A] and the importance of the textile factory was as more about exerting control over production than about efficiency of production.

Today a book arrived from The Book Depository for Fiona “The Object of Labour: Art, Cloth and Cultural Production”. It is a majestic tome and I’m looking forward into dipping into it sometime. It says it explores the “personal, political, social, and economic meaning of work through the lens of art and textile production”. Interesting its 408 pages are covered in words and the etymology of ‘text’ itself from Latin texere to weave 🙂

Somehow whilst my mind wandered over this I came to ponder the term material culture (maybe because have recently been re-reading Malfouris “The cognitive basis of material engagement” and Mike Wheeler’s response to it “Minds, Things, and Materiality“). The word ‘material’ has many meanings ‘raw materials’ for industry, ‘material evidence’ in law … but if you say the word to a person in the street ‘material’ means simply cloth. So interesting that cloth has played such a strong part in material culture and is ‘material’ itself.

This led me to wonder about the words (like text and textile) when the special meaning of material as cloth arose or even of they have different roots. Turning to the Shorter OED I looked up the definition of ‘material’. It is long, over half a column The etymology is again from Latin materia – matter – and there are meanings related to that (as in material culture), the legal and philosophical meanings, the sense of documents or sources used for writing, indeed the implements of writing ‘writing materials’ … but nowhere material as simply cloth, not even in the addenda of recent words.

The most common meaning of material, the most mundane, the one that sits next to my skin as I write – forgotten, written out of the dictionary, as the hand-loom weavers were written out of industrial production.

mirrors and estrangement

Posted on January 26, 2008 by alan

One of my PhD students, Fariza, has been extensively studying a single person, a women not so disimilar from herself. In doing so they have become friends and much of Fariza’s thesis (soon to be submitted) concerns the methodological issues surrounding this.

piano One issue we have discussed at length is the importance of estrangement, that distancing oneself from the commonplace to make the taken for granted become apparent. We do not see the things closest to us: the dirty toenail, the crumpled sheet, the asymmetric fall of the piano music stand, the things lost because they are in the open.

Artists and comedians often open our eyes to the unseen-because-unnoticed aspects of life, such as Emin’s own crumpled sheets or the poignant woman on the platform in “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin”¹. Garfinkel’s breaching experiments attempt to bring this incisive comic eye to social science. Of novelists Gabriel García Márquez is the master of this; through his true to life yet surreal accounts, with sometimes tenderness and sometimes almost cruel dispassion, he describes in intricate detail the intimate yet insignificant.

Berger talks about the way artists look at their work in a mirror to see it afresh and he himself sees the sunshine of lilacs in the mirror, lilacs that show him only their shadows². I was reminded of one of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books where the supra-reality of the mirror image is more crystal sharp, more ‘real’ than the ordinary world³.

Mirrors bring to mind reflective practice, just as Fariza has to write herself into her own accounts, the mirror often shows not only the unseen side of an object but also oneself and oneself in relation to the object. The seer and seen are themselves seen and, like Berger’s lilacs, the partiality of one’s seeing becomes more obvious. The mirror is not so much important because it shows the hidden sun-glowed lilacs, but because it says that the shadowed petals are not the whole flower.

I am reminded of that Dutch painting by van Eyck where the apparently pregnant woman and her husband stand in their home with their lap dog between them and discarded outdoor shoes untidily dropped⁴. On the wall behind the couple is a convex mirror capturing the whole scene from behind, and in the reflected doorway where you stand is the tiny image of van Eyck and another. Unlike supposedly ‘good’ scientific writing in incomprehensible passive speech, the artist has not painted himself out of his picture.

Berger also talks about paintings being painted for the moment of seeing, yet so many portraits do not look towards you, or even the artist, but through you, beyond you, to an unseen landscape. This may be because it is hard to paint eyes, or because it is hard to stare into the eyes of one’s painter. In life it is only with the deepest lovers or friends that we dare to share like this, hence perhaps the growing friendship that Fariza experienced when gazing deeply together into her subject’s life. Also, perhaps why the most intimate paintings have often been of the painter’s wives or lovers. Unusually in van Eyck’s painting, clearly of close friends, the couple do not gaze either aloof or uncaring past the viewer, but instead gaze within the painting demurely to one another … it is only the small dog that stares back.

This may be part of the Mona Lisa’s allure. I have never seen it ‘in the flesh’, but everyone talks about the eyes that they follow you. However, look again, it is not so much that they follow you, but, unusual amongst paintings, they actually look at you and I suppose at Leonardo himself.

I know Fariza has found this, and I am sure it is universal, that if we look closely and honestly at those around us, we begin more clearly to see ourselves .

This was a popular BBC TV series, but it is the book which I remember as most moving, I laughed out loud and shed tears equally.[back]
John Berger, “and our faces, my heart, brief as photos“, Bloomsbury, 2005[back]
end of Chapter 15 in “The Last Battle“[back]
The page about the Arnolfini Portrait at the National Gallery site allows you to zoom into the image. It also explains that the woman is not actually pregnant, but simply in the full skirt style of the day.[back]

Childhood dreams: Randy Pausch’ last lecture

Posted on January 20, 2008 by alan

Last week a link to Randy Pausch‘s last lecture “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” was posted on the CPHC mailing list. The lecture happened last September, so many of you will have seen this already, but I had not.

If I browse web stuff at all it is always a quick skim, certainly for videos, but with theses to read, marking to do, emails to answer … still this I had to watch end to end.

It is the most inspiring and challenging thing I have seen for years. While I have known aspects of Randy’s work, I don’t recall having met him in person, but he seems a truly remarkable man. While many achieve their dreams by trampling on the dreams of others, here is someone succeeding whilst building up those around him.

What is Computing? The centrality of systemics

Posted on January 13, 2008 by alan

Recently I was in a meeting where the issue of ‘core’ computer science came up. One person listed a few areas, but then this was challenged by another member of the group who said (to be fair, partly in jest), that core computer science should certainly include computer architecture, but not the ‘human stuff’.

I felt a little like a teenager complete with T-shirt and iPod dropped into Jurassic Park arguments that I thought had been put to bed in the 1980s suddenly resurfacing – how do you explain this white thing that makes sounds from its earphones to a caveman wearing skins?

However, I also felt a certain sympathy as I often wonder about computer science as a whole; indeed it has its own arguments in the 1960s and ’70s as to whether it was a ‘discipline’ as opposed to just an application domain for maths or electronics, or just a tool for business. Maybe one of the clinchers was the theoretical foundations of computing in the work of Church and Turing … but strangely enough at Lancaster the closest to this, the course on algorithmic complexity, is taught by a HCI person!

One of my worries in computing is that these theoretical foundations are still weak, there is black hole in the theoretical centre of computer science¹. However, these theoretical issues were certainly not what was bothering my colleague. To answer his challenge and my own worries about the discipline we really need to know – what is computing?

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This demands a discussion of its own, but the basic problem is that while Church and Turing gave us understanding of disembodied computation, we still do not have clear understanding of generic computation when embodied in devices in general only particular architectures. [back]