Die Welt is durch die Tatsachen bestimmt und dadurch, dass es alle Tatsachen sind.
[The world is determined by the facts, and by these begin all the facts.] (§ 1.1)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logische-Philosophische Abhandlung
We stated earlier that representing reality is an intractable problem. There are too many data types and relationships that must be identified and modeled, and some method for continuously collecting all of the data about reality would have to be implemented. Further, reality changes and so any representation of it would also have to be changed. An even trickier philosophical issue is the recursive reality that the data management process itself would also be a part of reality and, thus, it too would have to be recorded and managed.
Thus, one can only hope to represent some relatively simple aspect of reality. This can still be a challenge as we have begun to see. More specifically, this challenge can be decomposed and classified into a number of different problems, including, but not limited to, the following:
deciding what objects or concepts to represent
- identifying objects or concepts inside the reality
- deriving new data from existing data
- representing multiple entities of the same type
- representing entities that have complex structures
- representing relationships between entities
- restricting or controlling data values
We examine each of these problems in the remainder of this section.
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