Data Model Patterns: Conventions of Thought

Learning the basics of a modeling technique is not the same as learning how to use and apply it. To develop a data model of an organization is to gain insights into its nature that do not come easily. Indeed, analysts are often expected to understand subtleties of an organization's structure that may have evaded people who have worked there for years. Here's help for those analysts who have learned the basics of data modeling (or "entity/relationship modeling") but who need to obtain the insights required to prepare a good model of a real business. Structures common to many types of business are analyzed in areas such as accounting, material requirements planning, process manufacturing, contracts, laboratories, and documents. Topics In each chapter, high-level data models are drawn from the following business areas: * The Enterprise and Its World * The Things of the Enterprise * Procedures and Activities * Contracts * Accounting * The Laboratory * Material Requirements Planning * Process Manufacturing * Documents * Lower-Level Conventions

David C. Hay has pioneered in the use of process and data models to support strategic planning, requirements analysis, and system design since the late 1970s. In 1993, Dave founded the Houston-based consulting firm Essential Strategies, and, through it, developed enterprise models for many industries, including pharmaceutical research, oil refining and production, film and television, and nuclear energy. His work has been instrumental in identifying the fundamental structure of metadata and has helped hundreds of practitioners address issues of semantics in organization.

Using the relatively simple structures hidden in apparently complex situations, Dave developed the basis for Data Model Patterns: Conventions of Thought. A subsequent work, Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map, provides comprehensive views of both business and technical metadata; a third work, Enterprise Model Patterns: Describing the World, is a sequel to Data Model Patterns and describes and extensively models more-complex patterns.

An internationally revered speaker at conferences on data management, modeling, and semantics, Dave is also author of Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture, a comprehensive review of requirements analysis techniques. He lives in Houston with his wife, Jola, and, in increasingly rare spare time, pursues the ancient Japanese art of Origami, folding square pieces of paper into flowers, dinosaurs, or any of myriad other figures -- without cutting, pasting, or swearing.