Foreword

by John Zachman, Founder and President
Zachman International

It gives me great personal pleasure to write this foreword. I wrote the foreword to the first edition of Information Modeling and Relational Databases and to be brutally honest, I liked my first foreword and I haven’t at all changed my mind, with the exception that I like the second edition even more than the first edition, if that is even possible. Anyone familiar with my work would know that I have been arguing for many years that an enterprise ontology must include more structural components than those typically related to information. Terry Halpin and Tony Morgan have incorporated some additional structural variables in this new edition.

I suppose you would have expected this, but the second edition even surpasses the first, not only in terms of the updated and expanded modeling coverage, now including XML, business processes, and even the Semantic Web, and the plethora of exercises, but in terms of the significance of seven more years of experience and wisdom that can only be accumulated through the concentrated and intense investment of one’s life.

Because I liked my first Foreword, it is hard for me to materially improve on it, so I will borrow heavily from its basic content, making adjustments as appropriate.

I have known Terry Halpin for many years. I have known about Terry Halpin for many more years than I have actually known him personally. His reputation precedes him, and—take it from me—he is one of those people who is bigger than his reputation and far more humble than his contribution warrants. I have not known Tony Morgan for nearly as long but I know many people who have worked with Tony and have the highest regard for his work.

Both of these men have invested a lifetime in developing these enterprise modeling concepts, not because of the enormous market demand, but because of their intense belief that these concepts are vital for the advancement of our capability as humans to accommodate the extreme complexity and rates of change that characterize Twenty First Century life.

In fact, those of us who have devoted our lives to some of these apparently esoteric modeling pursuits are not doing it to make money, because the general market is hardly even aware of the issues, much less willing to pay for them. We are doing it because we know it is right and we are certain that survival of life as we know it is not dependent on writing more code. It is dependent upon being able to describe the complexities of enterprises (any or all human endeavor) so they can actually be designed, implemented as conceived, and dynamically changed as the environment changes around them.

We all owe Terry and Tony a debt of gratitude for persevering to produce this comprehensive modeling work.

When Terry asked me to write the industrial foreword to the first edition of this book, my first reaction was, “Good Night! Am I qualified to write a foreword for a Terry Halpin book”? I suggested that he send it to me and I would decide whether I could write it for him or not. After he sent me the book, my next problem was, I couldn’t put the book down! Can you imagine that? A technical book that keeps you wanting to read the next page?

Yes, it is a technical book, and the second edition is hardly any different. It is a very technical book that goes into detail on how to produce graphic models that exquisitely and rigorously capture the semantic details of an information system. But, it is also an easy-to-read book because it spells out clearly, concisely, and so simply the complexities of logic that provide any enterprise and any natural language with its capacity for nuance of expression and richness of description. For every step in the logic, there is provision of illustration and a test for your comprehension. There are hosts of models and exercises of real cases, none so contrived or so convoluted that it takes more energy to understand the case than to get the point.

Yes, Object Role Modeling 2 (ORM 2) is the notation for most of the illustrations, not simply because Terry actually “wrote the book” on ORM, but because of its incomparable ability to capture semantic intent and unambiguously express it graphically. And, yes, there is a discussion of ORM 2 modeling in sufficient detail for modelers to acquire the ORM 2 language capability. But the cases and illustrations are rich with analysis that can help even modelers unfamiliar with ORM to accurately extract the precise semantics of a “universe of discourse.”

But to me, all of this is not the strength of this book. The enduring strength of the book is two-fold. First, this is a very clear and vivid demonstration of the incredible complexities of accurately discerning and capturing the intentions of the enterprise and transforming them into the realities of an implementation. There is little wonder why the systems we have been implementing for the last 50 years (total history of “Data Processing”) are so inflexible, unadaptable, misaligned, unintegrated, unresponsive, expensive, unmaintainable, and so frustrating to management. We never bothered to produce an accurate description of the concepts of the enterprise in the first place!

If you don’t rigorously describe the enterprise to begin with, why would anybody expect to be able to produce a relevant design and implementation that reflected enterprise management’s reality or intent, or that could be adapted over time to accommodate their changes?

Tragically, few general managers are likely to read so technical a book as the second edition of Information Modeling and Relational Databases. But all general managers ought to read this book to get some perspective on the semantic complexity of their own enterprises, of the challenges of accurately capturing that complexity, of the necessity of their own participation and decisions in conceptual modeling, of the sophistication of the engineering that is required to produce quality and flexible implementations, of the fact that systems (automated or not automated) are not magic, they are logic and good judgment and engineering rigor and a lot of hard work.

In fact, every data modeler regardless of his or her syntactic specialty—whether it be Chen, Barker, Finkelstein, IDEF1X, IDEFlx(Object), UML 2, XML, or XYZ— ought to read the book for the same reasons. In fact, modelers of all kinds ought to read the book. In fact, every programmer ought to read the book. In fact, anyone who has anything to do with information or information systems ought to read the book!

The second strength of this book lies in the derivations from the high standard of semantic expression established by employing the second version of Object Role Modeling. Having demonstrated that it is possible to be rigorous and graphic in capturing precise semantic intent, the book straight-forwardly evaluates all the other popular graphic modeling notations in terms of their ability to duplicate that expression. There is a comparison with every other modeling notation that I have ever heard of, including the ones I mentioned above like Chen, IDEF1X, UML 2 etc. This is the most objective and precise comparison I have ever seen. The authors are very apologetic about appearing to be critical of other languages, but my observation is that this comparison was the most dispassionate and objective discussion I have ever seen. They even point out the strengths of these other notations and how and where in the overall process they can be used effectively. How’s that for objectivity?!

There is one more interesting dimension of these rigorous, precise semantic models —they have to be transformed into databases for implementation. The authors describe in detail and by illustration the transformation to logical models, to physical database design, and to implementation. In this context, it is easy to evaluate and compare the various database implementation possibilities including relational databases, object-oriented databases, object-relational databases, and declarative databases; and they throw in star schemas and temporal databases for good measure! Once again, I cannot remember seeing so dispassionate and objective an evaluation and comparison of the various database structures. Within this context, it is straight-forward to make a considered and realistic projection of database technology trends into the foreseeable future.

This is a book that is going to sit on my bookshelf forever. I would consider it a candidate to be one of the few classics in our rather young, 50-year old discipline of information management. I hope I have the personal discipline to pick it up about once a year and refresh my understanding of the challenges and the possibilities of the information profession. I am confident you will find the second edition of Information Modeling and Relational Databases as useful and enlightening as I have, and I hope that there will be many more editions to come!