Not wanting to rest on my laurels of past Wednesday's php program, and a little bit of time to let the ideas brew. I now had a tool which did something, it created a cube of data, in the old days we just called it a report. But the term "Knowledge Cube" seems so sexy and academic. I had been pondering a couple of goals discussed at out first meeting.
Goal 1: The data model needs to be flexible. Prof Bach did want to use a "table" because of all the baggage that goes along with structured data layout. So, I went back to my PICK Basic roots. Pick basic uses delimiters to define the data structure. We have all used comma and tab delimited files over the years, Pick Basic used char(254) char(255) char(256) to allow for a multi deminisional array of data to be stored. At this point I am not using those charaters or PICK Basic (but I just might) I am using the concepts of delimiters and using the semicolon, the comma, the tilda, etc to allow for multiple instances of data to live within one data type. Think of it this way, if you want to store a customer number, or a Protein/DNA value combination in a traditional data table, and you didn't know how many customers you had, or how many Proteins you have, you are not sure how many columns to create for a given table. So, the delimiter methodology allows a researcher or a person storing data to capture has much data as they want for a given item, while keeping it in a single row of information. Honestly, this is VERY old school.
Once I was able to determine the format to store the results in, then now it just becomes a programming exercise to create programs to work with this mufti-demensional data model. At first this sounds like that the data can go in any direction any which way. There will have to be rules, there will have to be standards. These rules and standards will develop as I better understand the business needs of the researcher.
Ahhhh! the crux of the problem ... Academic Systems IT versus Administrative Systems IT. Working at Yale University the past 15 years I have experienced the "great divide" of between the Academic & Administrative sides of the university. And even in my very first class at the University of Bridgeport, comments made by my professor made it clear to me that this divide was not limited to Yale.
I am hoping that my business problem solving approach helps create & improve processes for Prof. Bach and his team to find some of the hidden answers deep within the human genome.
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