Heh, not the matrix. What I am programming though is a ratable ontology, so the initial email with Concept, Entity and Dimension is the real code and I'm afraid flexibility is one of my main concerns because the number of vehicles, models and dimensions are completely unknown. So, single table inheritance on the vehicles is out of the question for the final application, unless of course there is a way to define models at run time, maybe every time a user defines a new vehicle I can call the ruby generator or something and have it create a class and corresponding tables. That may be overkill though. Is there any examples of web applications programming themselves? Now that sounds like some fun.
Anyway, the end goal is the ratable ontology (thesis related). For the prototype I'm developing though, I could use inheritance. The prototype uses 2 parent concepts and a few child ones (Drink and Food would be the parent concepts, and the child concepts are: Cocktail, Beer, Wine, NonAlcoholic for the former and Starter, Main and Dessert for the latter). So single table inheritance sounds good here. Subjective dimensions are a result of a user deciding what gives an object value. So a user would go into the system and decide that, "ooh, I think the rate at which a window can be lowered and raised makes a difference for me when rating a car", so then the user will define a new subjective dimension: window_raise_speed. The application will then attach that new subjective dimension to all the cars and allow all users of the system from that point on to rate a car over window_raise_speed. The thing about subjective dimensions is that they are all ordinal values, so they are all represented by floats. The actual values don't mean anything, but what they represent do (max_value means window_raise_speed is 'perfect', or 'couldn't ask for more', hence the subjectivity). I see your point when it comes to factual dimensions though, because they are not all ordinal and could be of any type. Really appreciate the feedback. Thanks! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-t...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
