[plug] Data Abstraction

[Denis Brown]

Hello, Onno.

This may be WAAAYYYY off base but it seems the concepts to which you refer 
crop up in ontology discussions (and software) from Stanford Uni among 
other places.   You're basically dealing with metadata, correct?   If this 
line of thought sounds interesting have a look at some of the stuff behind 
protege.stanford.edu   That might provide some inspiration.   Or confusion :-)

[I'm looking at ontology as a possible collection paradigm for the many and 
varied bits of information that comprise the knowledge set to describe and 
document computer systems.   And if you can make sense of that sentence, 
you're way ahead of me :-)  In my instance I wanted a documentation system 
that allowed the storage and retrieval of all possible data about how our 
computers were configured, where they were purchased, what software was 
installed, when the fan filters needed cleaning, so on and so forth.   The 
goal being to enable someone with no prior knowledge to get up to speed 
easily and quickly.   There was some helpful discussion on this several 
weeks ago - PLUG archives with keyword "documentation" should expose some 
of it.]

HTH,
Denis


At 17:35 17/12/2003 +1100, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>As there are a few programmers on this list, I thought I'd ask about a
>problem I've been attempting to tackle for the past 12 hours.
>
>I have items, descriptors and blobs.
>
>An item contains one or more descriptors.
>A descriptor refers to one blob.
>A blob may be referred to by one or more descriptors.