Creator of the Kohinoor?

Hi All

I had a fun time last two weeks as I joined a conducted tour of Europe. Travelled through 7 countries in the last 14 days. One of the tourist attractions was the Coster Diamond Factory in Amsterdam.

Its a nice place with lot of informative and sales stuff on diamonds and related jewellery. They seem to be good at their work and one of their claims-to-fame is that many years back Moses Elias Coster was invited by the Queen of England to polish/ re-cut the Kohinoor Diamond - expectedly to add to its fire and beauty. What surprised me is that this seems to be enough for this factory to claim to be "Creators of the Kohinoor" ... you can clearly see this label in the picture alongside which was taken in their factory. They have displayed a replica of the Kohinoor in their shop which is photographed. Zoom in and read the first line below.

Ofcourse here (as in most other western museums which display stolen artifacts) there is no mention that the Kohinoor is part of the looted bounty from Indian heritage. But I will let that point rest as much has been said about this already ...

I found at-least one other reference which went on to say that while the re-cuting work done by Coster on the Kohinoor did not add much to the stone's brilliance, it certainly diminished from its historic value. So I wonder whether Coster would accept this graciously and re-phrase that "Creator" to "Destroyer" or at-least "Damager" ...

Best Regards

36. Notes on Information Systems Architecture

Hi All,
I have been learning a little bit about Information System Architectures and the start point just has to be the Zachman Framework. Perhaps the Zachman Framework is to Architectures what the Deming Quality Cycle appears to be all Management consulting. Of course some of my friends call it the “Hamster Wheel of Pain” but that’s another story …

An interesting extract from the article (that I reproduce here – more as a “note-to-self”) follows. He ( Dr. John Zachman - Biographical Sketch) first discusses the various perspectives or fundamental architectural representations such as Owner’s view, Designer’s view, Builder’s view etc. and then goes on to say:
“A significant observation regarding these architectural representations is that each has a different nature from the others. They are not merely a set of representations, each of which displays a level of detail greater than the previous one. Level of detail is an independent variable varying within any one architectural representation…”

The original article appeared in IBM System Journal Vol. 26, No.3 of 1987 and is a must-read.
Best Regards