johcarter
commented
4 months ago @SeanHalversonGW I tend to agree, and also mixed meaning fields are not in the style of the rest of OED. I'm assuming you're referring to the Cyber coverages here?
We are currently reviewing Cyber v1 for more alignment with OED for property and this is one of the things under consideration. Thanks for raising the issue. We welcome anyone else's opinion for introducing separate binary fields to indicate inclusion/exclusion for financial coverages.
SeanHalversonGW
MattDonovan82
aiste-kalinauskaite
Description
Reasons for change
My guess is that this idea grew out of the sort of convention that often appears on coverage forms. The idea being there is often only coverage for line items which show premium, or a non-zero value on those forms. So just as nominal placeholders are used to indicate there is coverage, it appears that idea is being used for the schema design.
I could be wrong on my guess, but I do see the importance of getting an affirmative answer to coverage questions.
A better design could use binary variables to indicate when there is coverage and leave the limits and deductibles solely for the purpose of representing a monetary coverage-impacting value. Explicit is better than implicit or quasi-implicit.
A question I have as well is, if blank or zero indicate absence of coverage, what does a value of null mean? Null is roughly equivalent to blank from an Excel standpoint, but from a database design one it is quite different.