...
| id | title | publication date | author | publisher | pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 497531 | Cartoon Animation | 1967 | Wilcox, George | HB Press | 237 |
| 501378 | Animation Techniques | 1989 | Smith, Charlotte and Wilcox, George | Cinema Press | 359 |
| 391783 | Digital Animation | 2005 | Ivar, Samuel | Digital Logic, Inc. | 327 |
| 34682 | Dairy Barn Automation | 2011 | Wilcox, G.P. | University of Minnesota Press | 403 |
VIVO stores the book, each author, and the publisher as independent entities related to the other. This enables information about the book, authors, and publisher to be queried and displayed independently, a key feature of the semantic data model.
We have also introduced a common problems with spreadsheets – when a cell contains more than one value. We need a way to connect the book, "Animation Techniques," with two authors, and to indicate that Charlotte Smith is the first author and George Wilcox the second.
This example also points out another challenge in working with data – it's not always clear when values that appear similar actually represent the same entity, whether a person, organization, title, journal, or event. It would be easy to assume the George Wilcox in the first entry is the same as G.P. Wilcox in the 4th, but they are writing about very different topics. For a small organization, it may be easy to disambiguate authors, but this becomes a major challenge at the scale of a major research university.
...