limitations-of-formalisms

The foreword by Graeme Simsion revisits William Kent's 1978 book Data and Reality, emphasizing Kent's identification of arbitrariness and ambiguity as fundamental challenges in data modeling. Despite decades of research and practice, these core issues remain unresolved, with practitioners often unaware of the arbitrary decisions they make when mapping complex real-world phenomena into data models. Simsion argues that acknowledging and addressing these philosophical and semantic challenges is essential for advancing the discipline beyond superficial formalism improvements.