Data and Reality

This book addresses timeless questions about how we as human beings perceive and process information about the world we operate in, and how we struggle to impose that view on our data processing machines. The concerns at this level are the same whether we use hierarchical, relational, or object-oriented information structures;

I am not talking about very ambitious information systems. We are not in the domain of artificial intelligence, where the effort is to match the intellectual capabilities of the human mind (reasoning, inference, value judgments, etc.). We are not even trying to process prose text; we are not attempting to understand natural language, analyze grammar, or retrieve information from documents.

We are primarily concerned with that kind of information which is managed in most current files and databases. We are looking at information that occurs in large quantities, is permanently maintained, and has some simplistic structure and format to it. Examples include personnel files, bank records, and inventory records.