Table of Contents for

NoSQL and SQL Data Modeling: Bringing Together Data, Semantics, and Software

Our thinking is dominated by words. When those words have become overloaded with multiple ill-defined and contradictory meanings, we cannot think clearly. The words themselves keep us in a state of confusion. How will we break out of this tyranny? By simplifying and clarifying our terminology.

Part I of this book returned us to the ordinary English meanings of words that we have co-opted for special purposes in the field of information technology. For those with knowledge of established modeling notations and/or programming languages, it will be important to re-interpret those notations using the clarified vocabulary of everyday English. This next section contains a chapter on each of five major modeling notations. Each chapter provides a brief overview of the notation, and focuses on what those notations really mean in ordinary English. This will bring out a number of intellectual short circuits inherent in each notation that limit our ability to analyze requirements and design solutions.

If you know one of these notations, it is very important that you read the relevant chapter, so that you can make the translations necessary from the terminology you are familiar with to the terminology of COMN. By learning the refined terminology, new vistas of analysis and design will open up to you. You may be surprised at all the ideas you took for granted that turn out to have more to them than the notation teaches. But you will only be able to gain these insights if you can rise above the terminology and related concepts that are integral to the notation you already know. The chapters in this section are intended to help you do that.

You may read just the chapters that apply to the notations with which you are familiar. You may read all the chapters if that suits your interest. And, if you don’t have a background in any of these notations, feel free to skip this entire section.

The same example data modeling problem is used in each of these chapters so that if you are reading more than one chapter it will be easy to compare the notations to each other.

If you are an enthusiastic user or supporter of one of the notations discussed in the following chapters, please keep in mind that each chapter is not intended to be a complete presentation of the notation. Rather, it is intended to orient the reader who is already familiar with the notation to how the same concepts are represented in COMN, and to highlight the areas where COMN can represent things that the subject notation cannot.