Exercises

Exercises to help explain how Data Modeling works!

Modeling Places

In this exercise, you'll model two places for storage in a reviews website like Yelp, Google Local, or Foursquare.

We're not terribly worried about format for this. PAIR UP and don't worry about getting JSON exactly right - the important part is "name" : "value". If you get stuck trying to read something you wrote, here's a JSON Parser that will organize things for you.

• First, create a new file - call it places.json
• Start with an array with two or more objects - [{}, {}, {}]
• We're going to model places from this list, or choose your own favorite places!
  • Dartealing Lounge
  • Peets
  • ACME Bread
• Ask yourself these questions:
  • What properties do each of these places have? An address? A name?
  • How are they different?
  • What makes them different in the same way? (like type: grocery store, or pub, or coffee shop)
  • What information is useful, vs not useful? (phone numbers are useful, but number of bricks isn't. Unless you are building a national brick database.)
  • What is someone looking for when they look up information about this thing? What am I looking for?
• Try to store some information unique to each place - maybe a section from a menu at a food place, or credentials for the dentist. Models don't always have to be the same, but they do need a "baseline" of similarity.

Modeling Movies!

Making movies takes lots of relationships - Actors, Producers, Studios - we don't want to duplicate data, so let's form some relationships!

• First, create a new file - call it movies.json
• Start with three arrays with four or more objects -

  Movies = [{}, {}, {}, {}]
  Actors = [{}, {}, {}, {}]
  Studios = [{}, {}, {}, {}]
                  

• We're going to model four different movies!
  • Les Misérables
  • The Soloist
  • Sherlock Holmes
  • Rise of the Guardians
• These share actors, so we're going to assign an ID to each actor, studio, and movie.
• In each movie there are lots of actors - list only the top-billed actors for simplicity's sake. Create an array to hold just the IDs of the actors.
• Reference the ID of the actor you want to name by looking in your list of actors, and using the ID field.
• Do the same for the studios- reference them by ID (but you don't have to use an array)
• Try to simplify the studios - don't distinguish between Universal Studios and Universal Studios France. We're not IMDB :)