Dear Kathleen, (01)
Well as the person who is responsible for developing Shell's
conceptual data model fot its downstream business I will try
to answer this question. (02)
See below (03)
Regards (04)
Matthew West
Reference Data Architecture and Standards Manager
Shell International Petroleum Company Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom (05)
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.shell.com
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (06)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Kathleen A
> Ellis
> Sent: 03 March 2006 19:48
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: [ontolog-forum] Where does a taxonomy fit into a conceptual
> datamodel?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> This week, a member of our TaxCop (Taxonomy Community of
> Practice) group
> posted this question.
>
> "I am working on developing an enterprise wide conceptual
> data model. I
> wanted to know how developing a taxonomy is useful for the
> data model.?
>
> My background is microbiology and library science. I have
> only a vague idea
> about what an "enterprise wide conceptional model" is. (07)
MW: A conceptual data model will be an entity-relationship
model consisting of entity types (classes) and relationships
between the entity types. The relationships may have cardinality
constraints. You also find subtype/supertype relationships
between entity types. They are traditionally presented in
diagramatic form, but can also be in a lexical form. (08)
Data models are usually developed as the basis for a database
design, where entity types potentially become database tables. (09)
The link below should give you more information about data
models and how to develop them. (010)
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/Documents/princ03.pdf (011)
> Since
> the membership
> of Ontolog forum seems to be very technical, I would like to
> know how you
> would answer this question? Here is some more background for
> the question:
>
> Here is what I have to do. I have several budgets such as
> Finance, Human
> Asset etc. Now I am categorizing my Finance subject area
> into following
> :
>
> Fund Management
> Payment Management
> Cost Accounting
> Receipt Management
> Asset Management
> Now I can sub categorize any of these category , i.e. Fund
> Management is
> categorized into following:
> Account Structure
> Budget
> GL Account
> Audit Finding
> Available Funding etc
> Now you can see, I am developing this category, so where
> is Taxonomy
> here? Here is description of my Fund Management : (012)
MW: Well many of these things are activities. In principle, they
could become entity types, but looking at these, they are
rather general groupings of things. The critical question would
be "Does the organization want to hold information about an
instance of a (say) fund management activity?" If the answer
is "yes" then you make it an entity type. If the answer is
"no" then you need to decompose fund management into its component
activities and ask what you want to hold about that. (013)
MW: GL Account is a good example of something where you will
want to hold the instances. You will want to hold the names
of the GL accounts and know which transactions have been posted
to them. So GL account would be an entity type.
>
> "Funds Management activities capture the highest level of
> financial data
> and summarizes and maintains account balances by fund
> structure. Funds
> Management is also the primary tool for carrying out the Agency
> responsibility of establishing a system and maintaining
> official records
> for ensuring that it does not obligate or disburse funds
> in excess of
> those appropriated and/or authorized. Information captures
> processes
> involved with Funds Management include budget preparation, budget
> formulation, funds allocation, budget execution and funds control."
>
>
> Does this description mean to Taxonomy? (014)
MW: Not much. This is an activity description. You need to pick out
the "things of interest to the business" from it (and more probably
from the definitions of its component activities). They are your
candidate entity types. (015)
MW: Taxonomy is split into two parts when you are dealing with
data models. The first part is in the subtype/supertype relationships
between entity types. So you might have in a data model entity types (016)
Organization
Company
Department
Public Administration
Charity (017)
Where the latter would be subtypes of the former shown in the data
model. (018)
You might also have an entity type called Product Type. Instances
of this entity type would themselves be classes, and will probably
have a subtype/supertype hierarchy. These instances will be held
as data records in a data base, and as such are usually referred
to as Reference Data (or sometimes Master Data). Reference data
is stuff that changes slowly in the business and is usually
contrasted with Transaction Data which is about things like sales.
Most reference data are classes, and so reasonably the subject of
taxonomy, but some are individuals, like organizations and countries. (019)
So after all that explanation, the answer to give to your data
modelling colleagues is that taxonomy is found in the subtype/
supertype structure of the conceptual data model and in the
hierarchies of the Reference Data held in the databases it
defines. (020)
> __________________________________________
> Kathleen Ellis - Assistant Senior Information Specialist
> LINK -- Lilly Information and Knowledge
> Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN 46285
> Email: kaellis@xxxxxxxxx Voice: 317-277-4071 Fax:317-276-4418
>
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