About 500BC the greek philosopher Heraclitus said “Panta Rhei”, which translates to “everything flows”. The essence of his philosophy is that if you take a thing and examine it at two different points in time, you can always find something that changed in between the two. This thinking is at the heart of transitional modeling, in that not only does it capture the changes a thing has undergone, but also changes to the interpretation of the examination (making it bitemporal). Furthermore, while a thing is an absolute, an examination is relative to the one performing it. In transitional modeling concurrent and possibly conflicting opinions are allowed. Finally, examinations may lead to imprecise results or there may be uncertainty about the examination process. Both imprecision and uncertainty are well defined and representable concepts in transitional modeling.
I believe that even if you are not facing requirements that fits the above, yet, you will benefit from understanding the concepts of transitional modeling. Given some screws and a hammer it is way too easy to let the tool decide the solution, which is precisely what has been going on with database modeling.
Many features of transitional modeling can be found in our concurrent-reliance-temporal Anchor modeling. Why not take it for a spin in the online modeling tool?
