Developing Quality Metadata

7

Data Fields

Atoms

Now that we’ve dealt with character mapping, let’s start to work upward through the storage architecture and head for our discussion of database storage. First let’s look at field-level data.

We’ll begin with primitives, then storage representations and finally examine some of the techniques that data entry systems from the 1970s can teach us.

Primitive Data Types

Refer to Chapter 4 for discussions on how data values can be corrupted during the transfer between different systems.

Our primitive data types are few. It is quite amazing that everything we build can be described in simple terms using these primitives. We build ...