I was at the Data Modeling Zone Europe 2016 in Berlin as a speaker. It was the 4th Data Modeling Zone in Europe and in my opinion one of the best per the conference program and the interesting and awesome chats with other speakers and attendees. This year’s venue was the Abion Hotel in Berlin, situated next to the Spreebogen and for this a great environment around the venue.
ITGAIN, my employer and sponsor, had a booth at the conference to promote Steve Hobermans Data Modeling Master Class.
As usual DMZ starts very early and you get a huge balloon of information about data modeling. I appreciate the huge amount of fact based modeling talks, like ORM and FCO-IM. Dr. Terry Halpin described in the abstract about his workshop what fact based modeling is:
“Typically, analysis and modeling of an enterprise or business domain is a collaborative process between the business expert, who best understands the business rules and requirements, and the modeler whose main task is to elicit this understanding and capture it in a formal model that can be executed (directly or indirectly via transformation) by an information system. Ideally, the model (including its representation of the business rules) should be validated by the business experts. Since business experts are often non-technical, the model needs to be conceptual in nature, cast in language that is intelligible to the business expert while still being formal. Fact-Based Modeling aims to address this communication need in an optimal way.”
On the other hand, there was an amount of talks about practical use of data modeling as for example the great talk of Rogier Werschkull about PS-3C, a very interesting approach of doing the agile way in data modeling of an EDW. It’s similar to my own method of being agile and I will think about how to merge it with mine!
Or Clifford Heath’s talk about how to compose a fact-based model into any kind of schema. What a great insight into generating easy other models or even classes for programming languages with ORM and CQL.
In the awesome keynote of Barry Devlin he reflected upon the development of BI to AI and the consequences on ethics and economies our society will be faced with. Does AI applications open a Pandora'sBox?
One of my personal highlight was the rapping Steve Hoberman, awesome, and the “private class” with Patrik Lager and Diedrik de Jonge about Focal Point. Brief introduction and imagine, I have immediately the first real world problem which I can solve perfect with Focal Point in combination with Data Vault. Great outcome of this session.
Finally, my own presentation:
Great interactive session from @DV_Modeling at #DMZone , now next phase of modelling, from #conceptual into #logical. Hands-on experience pic.7905d1c4e12c54933a44d19fcd5f9356-gdprlock/bKyvpkIodW
— Remco Broekmans (@RemcoBroekmans) 11. Oktober 2016
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Nothing more to say, except see you next year in Düsseldorf and many thanks to Simone, Christian and Steve and all the others in the background for organizing this event!
What a great conference, so long,
Dirk