Re: Groupings

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From: Garry Petrie (gp_at_europa.com)
Date: Thu Feb 01 2001 - 04:39:44 CET 

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Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 19:39:44 -0800
From: Garry Petrie <gp_at_europa.com>
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Subject: Re: Groupings
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Richard Knapp wrote:

>> I do not think groupings outside of surveys and caves would be useful, artificial at best.
>> Groupings should be handled by the software applications identifying keywords in the
>> attributes of the objects, survey dates, locations, shot prefixes, etc.
>
> It could be argued that caves could logically be grouped into a system and many survey
> sections make up a survey. Or that these surveys comprise this section of a cave. They
> are meaningful to the user who, in the end, will have to use this format.

A "survey" to me, only represents data that was collected at one particular instance and
as such, by construction, share common attributes.

> Using keywords embedded in attributes is not a good way to identify groupings. There isn't
> a space restriction on what can be put into this format. And there is no penalty for devising
> a "perfect" format then downscaling it to a "useful" one.

I disagree totally. That is the whole point of a relational database, to group data by
attributes. The data doesn't have the groupings, the queries performed on the data does.
What you don't want is to build into the data groupings that are not mutally exclusive,
e.g. how do I group by time and group by location in the same data file?

Garry Petrie

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