Information management models data as tables and a set of relationships between those tables. Tables are a set of field values organized by rows and columns. Field values can be numbers, dates, or text which describes the information to be stored. For checkbooks, names, and lists, this works great. But what about more complex items − items which are difficult to describe with numbers, dates, or text? TGI Systems has found that tabular descriptions of complex items become more complex than the item being described and this leads to unwieldy and unmaintainable data models.
An aircraft is an example where complexity may best be simplified by building a scale model and testing it in a wind tunnel. Building a descriptive model is too complex of a process. Another example is building a plaster model of a drainage basin to measure water flows across the watershed surface. Iconic models are subscale constructs of the real thing.
TGI Systems employs the iconic model concept in the design of certain types of database. This is because there is a point where the descriptions of these data become too complex to manage. Using iconic modeling techniques, data may be stored such that numeric and tabular data may be developed on demand from direct measurement of the stored icon. These systems are remarkably fast and simplify the management of complex enterprise data models. Iconic data modeling is most applicable to infrastructure, topography, and other physical assets which have a size, shape, location, orientation, and proximity to other objects.