How to model government organization hierarchies so that the list can expand and compress

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Fri, 14 Aug 2015 16:42:00 -0700, Alex Glaros writes:
>Frank, thanks for describing the terminology of what I'm trying to do.
>
>1. Do the recursive join Postgres examples you linked to, use a data structure where the child has the adjoining parent-ID? Examples look great.
>
>2. Not 100% sure that hierarchical is the perfect solution but will go with that now. Of course some agencies will be at equal levels; will ignore for now.
>
>3. Could not find Laura's response. Was it deleted?
>
>4. Solution will expressed in the DB, not Python.
>
>Much appreciated!
>
>Alex

What I said was, that real agencies are almost never perfectly
heirarchical.  That's an oversimplification.  In the real world
Organisation A (say Army) and Organisation B (say Navy) decide they
have common interests and make a Joint Department.  If you run that
department you report to superiors in _both_ organisation A and
organisation B, get orders from both places and so on and so forth.
You must decide now what you want to do when you run into such
departments, because that will greatly influence your design.

Laura