As a consequence of our previous use case definitions, we can easily identify the type of data that the Place Reviewer application must cater for—by the creation of appropriate models. The first type of data is the user data and the second type is the review data. The user data, as the name implies, is the data relating to a user registered on the platform, whereas the review data is the necessary data for every review created on the platform.
We will require the following data for the user: the user's email address, username, password, and account status. In addition, we will need a unique identifier for each user of the platform—a user ID—and the date on which the user was registered. With respect to the data necessary for reviews, we will need a review title, its body the content of the review, the address of the place reviewed, the name of the place reviewed, positional information of the place reviewed (its longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates), and a place ID to specifically identify the place being reviewed. In addition, a unique identifier will be required for the review being created as well as information relating to the time the review was created.
At this juncture, you might be thinking: hold on, why do we have information pertaining to a place (a place name, place address, place ID, and longitude and latitude) coupled with the information of a review? Why don't we separate this information and consider it a distinct type of data we will be catering for? If you thought this, you are right, that will be a great approach to doing things if we, say, had a database table that possessed all the information of all the places we wanted to be reviewable on the platform. Sadly, we do not have any such table.
Now, you may be wondering: how can we provide a user with the ability to review places of which we have no information about? The answer is simple. We utilize Google's Places API. We shall take a look at how to do this in the next chapter, but for now, hold on tight as we begin implementing the Place Reviewer backend.