What makes a good model?

Andrea takes a stab at stating it.

Excerpt:

• As simple as possible, and complete (Better not bigger, spanning the semantic space)
• Consistent
• Extensible and reusable (Designed to evolve and be used beyond original purposes)
• Design tradeoffs well-understood and documented
• Normalized (To a point)
• Incorporating stable and well-defined concepts and semantics – Usually taken from other standards and models
• Designed and encoded for interoperability and sharing of semantics – But not limited by a specific encoding (such as XML Schema or database limitiations)