ChiliPLoP Hot Topic: Patterns of Time in Information

Leader:

Goal

The purpose of this hot topic is to discover patterns of time in business information systems and to organize new and old patterns.

Discussion

For example, sometimes you want to keep track of how your data changes over time. One way is to tag the relations in a relational database with their effective dates. This changes how you treat referential integrity, since the problem is not deciding when to delete obsolete relations, but how to mark them as obsolete.

At other times you want to keep track of how your rules change over time. For example, the problem with processing old timecards is not that an employee's salary has changed, since you can easily keep track of how that has changed over time. The real problem is that the rules for calculating paychecks might have changed, perhaps because of a new union contract.

Both of these are software-oriented problems with time. Other problems are more closely related to the domain. For example, often you have to make predictions about transactions, and then have to make adjustments if those predictions turn out to be wrong. An investor predicts that his dividends will be paid on time, and a stockbroker who makes a trade assumes that the terms of the trade will be fulfilled, that he will be able to take possession of the stock to give it to his client.

Workshop Activities

During ChiliPLoP, we will brainstorm additional patterns, work on writing down the patterns, and workshop them and improve them. We'll interconnect them, abstract them, and organize them. Here is a proposed schedule: