Object Schema — Realizing Orthogonal Data Models
Apparently the concept of “schema” originated in ancient philosophy — that was news to me. One illustration of it I found on wikipedia: “People use schemata to organize current knowledge and provide a framework for future understanding.”
Quoting Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “A schema … is a linguistic “template”, “frame”, or “pattern” together with a rule for using it to specify a potentially infinite multitude of phrases, sentences, or arguments, which are called instances of the schema. Schemas are used in logic to specify rules of inference, in mathematics to describe theories with infinitely many axioms, and in semantics to give adequacy conditions for definitions of truth.”
On November 19th 2024, I will be granted my second patent for using xsd schema to model typesafe entities in enterprise systems. This is a novel use of the schema concept. By teaching past database schemas, we now model the actual entities that coders use to access data. By doing this, we create system-wide cohesion, stability, and eliminate the enormous amount of data wrangling existing coders engage in.
Per the Stanford quote, the entities Splicer generates are instances of this schema. This whole mechanism creates data models that are orthogonal to open source code bases; we can literally switch out the business domain context for coding by applying a different xsd schema “document”.
Essentially, we have reduced application architecture down to simple document “blueprints”. This allows us to rapidly prototype and iterate multi-client systems with schema-based development.
