Data Modeling or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Maths

This week's readings were real brain teasers! Lots of symbolic logic and math concepts I haven't thought about since algebra 2. The Wikipedia article of "normalization" was very challenging and I think it obfuscated the process. I found the University of Texas tutorial much more comprehensible. I wish I would have read UT's explanation first. Although I think I got the core idea of normalization, I am still unclear about the data manipulation operations used to perform the process. I didn't get how to multiply two data relational tables.

Another confusing thing to me was the lack of standards for notation of the Entity-Relationship Diagrams. I saw the relative strengths and weaknesses of the "crow's foot" style in the Data Modeling: Finding the Perfect Fit article as well as the "Martin" notational style used in all the University of Texas ERD diagrams. Martin does a better job of indicating parent-child relationships, but "crow's foot" does a better job at illustrating mandatory vs. optional existence of relationships and one-to-many relationships.

Reactions to Unit 9 readings

The readings for this week covered technology planning for many types of institutions and environments. I was most interested in the readings this week that addressed government IT project management, because that is the environment in which I currently work (state government). I particularly liked the Brenda Whittaker article "What went wrong? Unsuccessful information technology projects," because of her in depth statistical analysis and research methodology. Don Sager's article on environmental scanning also piqued my interest, because I think that lifetime learning among information professionals is one of the most important aspects of the profession due to the rate of technology innovation and its affects on society.

The Michael Schuyler article made me think. I agree that a technology plan is primarily a "political" document. It is essential for there to be clear communication and assurance of accountability between a project team and its stakeholders in technology initiatives. Unfortunately, as Schuyler, Whittaker, and others point out, there is often a lack of understanding and enthusiasm among top managers for sponsoring innovative or "modern" tech projects. It has been my experience so far in state government that top management has little incentive to sponsor such projects, despite the lip service paid to technology in official vision statements. Why? I believe its a combination of aversion to risk from potential failure of the projects (top management ultimately bears responsibility) and the organizational culture of many state employees who prefer the status quo.

Learning XML

I got an introduction to and basic working knowledge of XML using the W3C tutorial website: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp

I found this tutorial to be intuitively designed and easy to follow. Since I am a novice to XML (I've only used it once before for a school assignment back in 2006), I only went through the first 12 lessons under "Basic." My XML assignment was challenging to construct. I had to trouble-shoot many aspects of the XML coding, especially when I tried to go beyond the simple tutorial exercise examples and integrate the XML principles with the HTML code tags for link and images. I kept getting errors saying my XML code was not "well formed" because of "lack of necessary spacing" in my links to the images, but I eventually through trial and error made it display using a web-browser syntax-error free.

My demo system is running well. I was able to follow the instructions for this unit to set up a basic Apache server with no problems. The steps were straight-forward.

Learning HTML

For the Assignment 2 of Unit 7, I consulted several sources for learning basic HTML. First I looked at Bruce Fulton's PowerPoint slide for an general overview. Then I went to the W3C for some more in-depth online tutorials. I found the W3C tutorials pretty straighforward. Several times I wished they would have periodically combined several of the simple lessons together in a more complex source code example because I got confused about the syntax of combining multiple tags and elements while I was trying to create my first HTML webpage for Assignment 3. There was definitely some trial and error going on!