Saturday, January 18, 2003

Normalized Formats. The old pattern of "convert Y to normalized format, then convert to X" is something we've all used, and used many times.  The thing is, trying to construct a single normalized form for many object (or knowledge) models just isn't very easy, and often you end up with something that's unwieldy. I've been playing with multiple normalized models...the idea is to create progressions of models -- evolutions of structure that approach normalization but do not necessarily fully normalize information from multiple domains.  You normalize to the intersections between the models instead. Why do this? If you're trying to construct information relays -- things that can take arbitrary information and move it around -- then you want something like this.  Sometimes, in a given domain, there are radically different approaches to the basic problems (this is from my day job).  When you're dealing with that, you don't want to lock yourself into (or have to maintain) that single normalization. 2:14:38 PM