Re: joint occurrences?

Eric Scheid wrote:

> On 1/11/03 9:51 AM, "Michael Bernstein" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>>It would also let you search for "that episode that has a character
>>occurrence of Evil Bob in leather pants and an occurrence of That Midget
>>Guy in slinky nightwear".
> 
> Not really ... you still wouldn't know that Evil Bob wears the pants in that
> relationship, only that there are two characters there (Bob, Midge), and
> someone is wearing pants, and someone is wearing slinky nightwear (possibly
> the same someone, at that).
> 
> I've thought some more on the problem, and "granularity" is almost the right
> answer... what I really need to do is build a new database/collection of
> "appearances", rather than "episodes" or "scenes", where each appearance can
> be classified as to which character, dressage, episode, scene, role (lead,
> minor, support, extra, etc). Each "appearance" entity would, by definition,
> only contain at most *one* character classification (or possibly none, if
> the character is unidentified).

If you re-read my email, you'll see that that is more or less what I 
said, except the I used the phrase 'character occurrence' instead of 
appearance. I could have been a bit more clear that the episodes broke 
down to scenes, and the scenes broke down to one or more 'character 
occurrences', which were the subject of classification.

> So, the fundamental question is "what are the *things* which we are
> attempting to classify?" ...
> 
> Thus, there would be one database of "episodes", and a separate database of
> "appearances", where in one the episode is the entity being classified, and
> in the other it is a quality of classification.

Umm. Not every relational database task should be subject to 
reformulation as an exercise in classification.

Episodes *contain* (or are composed of) scenes, which *contain* 
appearances (or, if you like, you can have appearances contained 
directly in episodes). This is a classic one-to-many relationship 
between two tables in a database. There is no need to go through 
additional contortions to make episodes a type of classification that 
appearances are subject to.

> Marrying these two databases is left as an exercise for the student ;-)

Make them two tables in the same database, not two separate databases.

Cheers,

- Michael Bernstein


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