I'm looking for any references, discussion or theory about
hierarchical models for situations such as residential addresses,
geopolitical subdivisions, corporate structures, military ranks, file
systems, type systems, etc.

I'm specifically interested in models that can recognize partial
correlations between subtrees, e.g. most/all countries have cities,
although there may be intermediate groupings or divisions such as
states, counties, provinces, territories, blocks, municipalities,
etc. Same with task-specific teams in corporate and military
structures.

We all have to deal with such hierarchies, but is there a theory for
it?

Nilone wrote:

Do you mean something like this?

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/...sted_rdbms.pdf


What does that mean? Should the data model itself express such
quantitative correlations, or only the query language?

--
Reinier

"rpost" <rpost (AT) pcwin518 (DOT) campus.tue.nl> wrote

Oh no! This sounds like something that could have been written by Dawn
Wolthuis.

TREES & HIERARCHIES IN SQL is my book on that sort of thing. I give
several different models that can be used.

On Aug 15, 6:46*pm, rp... (AT) pcwin518 (DOT) campus.tue.nl (rpost) wrote:
No, I don't think so. In that paper, the parent-child relationship is
an attribute of the type of the parent or child, meaning that a
customer always has orders, an order always consists of parts, etc.

I'm talking about hierarchies where the parent-child relationship is
part of the data. For example, from Wikipedia: 'Counties are used in
48 of the 50 states, while Louisiana is divided into parishes and
Alaska into boroughs. These are considered "county-equivalents", as
are some cities not designated as part of a county.'

Take a look at http://www.bitboost.com/ref/internat...s-formats.html.
What are the common attributes - how should I model an address?

It seems to me that these organizational structures can be modeled as
trees where every node is typed and every node can have children, but
the parent/child relationship is not an attribute of the type of the
parent. The entire tree forms a domain such that valid values of the
domain are paths from the root of the tree to any leaf.

If you take the types and values of the nodes through which such a
path passes / is constructed, you get something that looks like a
tuple, except that the presence of certain attributes depends on the
values of other attributes.

I see some resemblance to parsing regular expressions.

On Aug 16, 3:09*am, Nilone <rea... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
That would be XML -- a robust and well established data model applied
universally to any problem.

So are you looking into theory of parsing? This one has been developed
in little to none database context, of course. Or is it transitive-
like query of binary relation in database context (http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_model)?

On Aug 16, 7:16*pm, Tegiri Nenashi <tegirinena... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
XML can represent it, yes. I'll investigate further in this
direction.

I'm not focused on one specific topic. This week, I had to try to
model addresses for a new project, hence the post. In general, I'm
interested in such topics as systems theory, types and classification,
abstraction, programming paradigms, and models of computation.

On Aug 16, 1:21*pm, Nilone <rea... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Well, you missed two subtle points. First, I borrowed the word
"robust" from some computer climate modeler who used it dozen times in
his last paper. Second, XML is far from being a just a data model, let
alone "well established" one.

To make it crystal clear, I was kidding in the XML part of my message;
the other part was serious.

On Aug 17, 4:10*am, Tegiri Nenashi <tegirinena... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
LOL, that's funny! I was humoring you, and "able to represent" was as
much credit as I was willing to give XML. I'm happy to hear I
misjudged your post.