Mastering Data Modeling: A User-Driven Approach

Foreword

The world of Web-based retail, financial, medical, educational, and business-to-business applications is rapidly expanding as the infrastructure for moving vast amounts of information around the world is being put into place. But, as is often the case, hardware advances are ahead of the necessary corresponding software advances. This has led to an explosion of reuse and integration problems, as designers seek to use existing information systems in new ways.

But many, many existing legacy systems embed in highly ad-hoc fashions the “meaning” of data in the code that manipulates it, thus forever entangling the nature of the application and data. Clearly, the evolution, reuse, and integration of information systems require that this ...