scott_michael_meyer wrote:

> So why not scrap inheritance altogether and work with
> identities and properties of identities (values or
> relationships to other identities)? As it happens,
> I have a working example of such a system, freebase.com.
>
> If you consider an interesting identity:
>
> http://www.freebase.com/view/en/arnold_schwarzenegger
>
>

Scott, I'm not ignoring your interesting post, I'm thinking about both
it and Philip's recent post on multiple inheritance.

The argument, as I see it, is that types don't necessarily fall in a
simple hierarchy. The example is Schwareznegger, who has a base
identity of a person but who is also an actor (well, sort of), a
politician, and a retired model, and while actors and politicians are
not strictly unrelated, neither can be said to inherit from the other.

I'm convinced that the object model doesn't work for databases; the
death of a dozen OO database companies pretty much catalog the manifest
problems. But the idea of extending the relational model to increase
the flexibility of data is well worth exploring.

--
Jim Starkey
President, NimbusDB, Inc.
978 526-1376