Back in 1983, when "expert systems" where just starting to be all the rage, I had a contract (and was later hired as Chief Scientist) with a startup company that wanted to develop several microcomputer based "business" applications. I realized that they were all essentially database applications with a forms-centric user interface. [Mind you, this was back before there were real databases on PCs, and 80x24 color text was the state of the art for user interfaces.] I decided to build a general database and forms UI engine from scratch, and then quickly create the business apps (e.g. contacts, H/R data, calendar, memos, etc) using the engine. The engine eventually became a product in its own right and was dubbed Savant. Mark Wozinac (brother of the famous Woz) ran an early computer store in Silicon Valley and was an early enthusiast for the technology.
Having always been interested in AI and general knowledge representation, and with expert systems looking hot, I took a semantic networking approach. Savant had an interactive development mode where the user could move the cursor around the screen and dynamically define form fields, associating each field with an EAV (entity/attribute/value) data triple (way before the term EAV was widespread). The name of each form field was the "attribute", the value entered into the field was the "value", and the "entity" was the value of some other form field that the user specified. Savant let users create their app, complete with database, on the fly, with the form definitions stored in the same EAV database. I had some novel techniques to optimize the data retrieval (using my written from scratch B+/B* tree DB kernal). All this was written in UCSD Pascal (grandpa to Java) such that it ran on IBM PC, Radio Shack TRS80, Apple ][, and exotic 32-bit computers, and ran on FLOPPIES! Only shortly later, when Corvus hard drives for Apple ][ and the IBM XT came out, did it benefit from their size and speed. To UCSD's credit, I didn't really have to change any code.
One of my inspirations was to make a more intuitive approach for non-technical users than was required by a popular database of the day, pfs:File. It also let users create form screens and save the data from each screen into its own "table". I thought that it was too complicated to know which screen each bit of data you wanted was on, plus, you couldn't share data between screens! My goal was to have all data available from all screens/forms without having to know about tables and schemas. One would just design forms and the data would magically go to the right place.
The other day, I stumbled across, MindModel, a product that looks very similar to Savant (except its written for the new-fangled graphic user interface :-) It also looks like it may have the same fatal flaw that my system had. Namely, Savant didn't (because I didn't) understand that the value of a "name" attribute of an entity is not the same thing as the entity itself (nor is it a key). E.G. (JoeSmith,phone#,123-456-7890) does not represent the same information as (key123,name,JoeSmith) plus (key123,phone#,123-456-7890). So, if you change JoeSmith to JoeBlow, you either lose the association with other attributes tied to JoeSmith, or you must remap them all. So, Savant changed all the JoeSmith references to JoeBlow in all triples, but then what to do about the phone number changing? If you change all 123-456-7890 references to 321-654-9999, you have not only changed JoeSmith's phone number but anyone else who shared that number. In other words, it didn't really understand the concepts of entity and attribute.
I see the same fuzzy understanding of entities and attributes in many articles about the Semantic Web and how easy it is to encode data such that any lay person can do it intuitively. They show the same (JoeSmith,phone#,123-456-7890) flavor examples. We all need more basic metaphysics and ontology training in grade school!
Having always been interested in AI and general knowledge representation, and with expert systems looking hot, I took a semantic networking approach. Savant had an interactive development mode where the user could move the cursor around the screen and dynamically define form fields, associating each field with an EAV (entity/attribute/value) data triple (way before the term EAV was widespread). The name of each form field was the "attribute", the value entered into the field was the "value", and the "entity" was the value of some other form field that the user specified. Savant let users create their app, complete with database, on the fly, with the form definitions stored in the same EAV database. I had some novel techniques to optimize the data retrieval (using my written from scratch B+/B* tree DB kernal). All this was written in UCSD Pascal (grandpa to Java) such that it ran on IBM PC, Radio Shack TRS80, Apple ][, and exotic 32-bit computers, and ran on FLOPPIES! Only shortly later, when Corvus hard drives for Apple ][ and the IBM XT came out, did it benefit from their size and speed. To UCSD's credit, I didn't really have to change any code.
One of my inspirations was to make a more intuitive approach for non-technical users than was required by a popular database of the day, pfs:File. It also let users create form screens and save the data from each screen into its own "table". I thought that it was too complicated to know which screen each bit of data you wanted was on, plus, you couldn't share data between screens! My goal was to have all data available from all screens/forms without having to know about tables and schemas. One would just design forms and the data would magically go to the right place.
The other day, I stumbled across, MindModel, a product that looks very similar to Savant (except its written for the new-fangled graphic user interface :-) It also looks like it may have the same fatal flaw that my system had. Namely, Savant didn't (because I didn't) understand that the value of a "name" attribute of an entity is not the same thing as the entity itself (nor is it a key). E.G. (JoeSmith,phone#,123-456-7890) does not represent the same information as (key123,name,JoeSmith) plus (key123,phone#,123-456-7890). So, if you change JoeSmith to JoeBlow, you either lose the association with other attributes tied to JoeSmith, or you must remap them all. So, Savant changed all the JoeSmith references to JoeBlow in all triples, but then what to do about the phone number changing? If you change all 123-456-7890 references to 321-654-9999, you have not only changed JoeSmith's phone number but anyone else who shared that number. In other words, it didn't really understand the concepts of entity and attribute.
I see the same fuzzy understanding of entities and attributes in many articles about the Semantic Web and how easy it is to encode data such that any lay person can do it intuitively. They show the same (JoeSmith,phone#,123-456-7890) flavor examples. We all need more basic metaphysics and ontology training in grade school!
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