The Art of Modeling Names

As you may have noticed, the discussion here talks about names because they usually hide a lot of unstated assumptions, but the reality is this is as relevant to most data structures that you have within enterprise level ontologies. The bigger take-away here is to understand that we're moving into a world where data conversions and data integration dominate, and the kind of thinking that wants to just add a couple of fields to an object to represent a name or other singleton entries (addresses, contact information, emails, companies, stores, the list is pretty much endless) is likely to get you into trouble, especially when data worlds collide. In my next article in this series (check back here for the new link) I'll look at the temporal aspect of change, as well as exploring controlled vocabularies and how they fit into contemporary data modeling.