Hi Ken,
Due to the IVS issue I kept quite a bit... In the mean time everything is back in order and I just bribed you
or let's say that I bought DVDprofiler Mobile a couple of days ago.
To come back to this proposal: I had a couple of minutes time to in the office quickly draw some classes to show you a bit more in a technical way what I mean (don't blame me for using wrong stereotypes
). Currently the database schema will look like something shown below in the picture marked "current". I know that this will not be 100%, I skipped a lot of details - this is just to show my point a bit more clear.
Because the crew, cast and other information (Original title, Country of Original, Production Date etc.), that is the same for a partucular movie is entered by different user in different styles separately for each DVD the quality of quite a lot of the profiles is poor and
a lot of effort and energy is wasted by doing the same work several time by different people for several DVDs.
By moving into the direction of spliting the entity "dvd" into an entity "movie" and "dvd" you could start streamlining the efforts of the user. The quality of the profiles would improve. More people will contribute to the content of a single movie. Furthermore the reviews of movies will start make sense (10 DVD with 3 review comments each are not significant, 30 comments are...) (please see my original post)
And overall this will result in a much better quality in comparsion to other products (imdb etc.) and better user satisfaction.
I am aware that this will need some hard thinking to bring this to an end (additional crew member for a particular dvd release etc.) and that there are different versions of movies (Starwars old version, and new version) but this is all solveable (e.g. Contribution rules).
Please think again about that. I would be more than please to see your comments on this, Ken!
There is also no need to do this with a "big bang" approach. You could start it smoothly in the background by splitting the entity dvd-movie apart but keeping it as a 1:1 relationship for the beginning. etc.
"Current":
"Proposal":
As you can see in the above proposal for example the Cast & Crew information, original title, country of origin, production year, genre, review of a movie etc. are the same for a movie and should be stored and contributed only once. UPC, title, region encoding, pictures, features etc. are different for every DVD and should still be stored seperatly.
Probably I confused now most of the non-technical readers, don't blame me for that...
Cheers, NEWT0N