Two ways of looking at a database

In the previous chapter, I thought I'd done enough to explain the mechanics behind the business situation I was developing. It was with some surprise when one of the readers expressed disappointment with the explanation I'd given. He wrote:

"I still think that what I brought up back in chapter 10 is missing. Basically, my point is that a non-negligible challenge in Peter's proposal is to establish and maintain (or rather, let evolve) an appropriate framework. Even if smart clients are installed on users' computers, to let them process their own set of attributes, the main data needs to be properly qualified first.

In Peter's matchmaking algorithm, 96 different Boolean attributes (they could have also been dimensions with fractional values) are used to model each individual. Adding, modifying or deleting individuals from the entire distributed network does not represent a big challenge. But how can the system be made to accept new attributes and to reject obsolete ones?

Worse than obsolescence, redundancy has to be dealt with. Not because it wastes data space, but because it leads to inconsistencies. Now, this has more to do with politics than technology.

In my previous posting, I mentioned two existing approaches: - The Yahoo approach: regardless of who is feeding the data, there is a small committee of designated people who constantly monitor the system and modify the framework accordingly - The Newsgroup approach: self-designated users creating enough momentum to let the framework evolve one way or another. Regardless of how dictatorial or anarchic Peter's recommended system is, it has to tackle this political issue.

Vahe Kassardjian

This chapter, I hope, will answer most of Vahe´ Kassardjian's reservations. Firstly, it must be pointed out that chapter 12 dealt with a very general overview of the idea. If it is to be applied to a specific situation for an e-business purpose, there would have to be an element of human control over the main categories of the people space. This will be explained later. However, the other difficulties envisaged would apply only if a server side database were used in a conventional way.

At the same time as I received Vahe Kassardjian's post, I received a post from another reader, Kate Cooper, who has a senior fellowship at Warwick University – running their Innovation progammes for various MSc degrees in Engineering Management. Kate is not a database technologist but has been a consultant to UK blue chip companies since 1983, mostly advising on human communication in large organisations. She saw the beyond the nuts and bolts of the technicalities to visualise databases as part of an interactive system of communication. She wrote:

Thinkof Experian/Acorn and how they're used by businesses - turn that on its head and think how individuals can use the same information . . . now *that* is maybe a lucrative idea!!!

They enable a user to latch into a known psychological construct - there are some human universals. (e.g. an understanding of hierarchy is universal, probably because of family relationships, but knowing about Cinderella is a parochial). A hugely pervasive and successfully exploited construct is that of a 'journey' - already used of course on the Net with terms such as 'path' and 'navigation tools'. There are many others that could be used - see stigmergy later. Also metaphors to assure people - signposts, junctions, fastroutes, superhighway, meandering path, etc. etc. PLUS you are, I presume, familiar with the social network stuff, 'small worlds' -

I have a theory that stigmergy trails (as I think of it) within an Internet system might identify the equivalent of the mavens, connectors and salespeople that Gladwell talks of - now imagine that the *geometry* of such trails were evident to the observer of this hive mind *and* that an individual could be both participant in the mind and observer of it. Some kind of stigmergy-driven search engine???

An aside: humans find it very difficult, if not impossible to 'see' the dynamics of a system. So we create geometries to help us - Poincare's 'phase space' - and, as highly visual primates, that suits us. The only 'geometry' of the Internet that most of us have is 'bricks and mortar' - we need, obviously, a new model that reflects the dynamics - hence my 'stigmergy' idea in which the rate of change of the trail matters more than the trail itself; fashion fashions itself. That we can handle these kinds of dynamic geometries as representations is evident in our nightly view of the TV weather forecast . . . Whatever, the Internet could do with a geometric model . . .

Kate Cooper

Here was a view from somebody who claims to be non technical but is an expert in business systems. Kate's mental model wasn't influenced by the technicalities of database design, she was seeing a more abstract representation that eliminated all the problems anticipated by the database expert.

The two key models that came into Kate's mind when she read the previous chapters were Experian/Acorn and stigmergy. Let's take a look at these.