It’s about how data is terrible and we can’t accurately capture data in information systems because we don’t know what we, as the people capturing the data, actually mean when we think about things. (View Highlight)
It is often a matter of choice whether a piece of information is to be treated as a category, an attribute, or a relationship. (Which raises the question of how fundamental such a distinction really is.) This corresponds to the equivalence between “that is a parent” (the entities are parents), “that person has children” (the entities are people, with the attribute of having children), and “that person is the parent of those children” (the entities are people and children, related by parentage). (View Highlight)
The big problem is that it’s almost impossible to find. The first edition was published by a boutique press and the second edition was self published, and then the author up and died. Secondhand copies of the 2nd edition sell for upwards of a hundred dollars! Thankfully, “Technics Publication” rescued it and published a third edition. Unthankfully, they also added a bunch of “updates” and pitches for their other books to the text. Also, they took out a whole bunch of important content. Everybody I know who read the second edition think it’s one of the greatest software books ever. Everybody I know who read the third edition said “meh”. (View Highlight)
