Geoffrey J. Kennedy

Department of Information Science
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
gkennedy@infoscience.otago.ac.nz

A saga of research: from the first germ of an idea through its development
to applications, concluding with a glimpse into the future for further
research.

From the simple notion of elementary structures the talk demonstrates the
value of these elements in aiding understanding of the data model and the
identification of errors or ambiguities, and in providing insight into
likelihood of processing difficulties.

Next, some not so successful applications of the concept to project
estimation are described.

Finally a new approach, the 'implied components' model, is explained and
some preliminary results from the analysis of 50 student projects are
presented.