Data structures is often part of the model, but that's not what the "data model" is all about. It's about having a good overview of how everything is connected.
It wasn't clear. If he meant data structures then say data structures. If he meant something different or broader by 'data model' then I don't know what that was.
I value plain, simple code and equally plain, simple writing. I am becoming dismayed at the trend towards fancy labels on basic things. A while back someone talked about 'affordances' in C# which sent me into a tailspin because I thought there was some significant area of the language I'd never encountered. Turns out he just meant attributes and methods.
@pessimizer, @SuperCuber - So educate me. Let's base it on something I've actually done, a code analyser. For this you parse the code into an AST, and to deal with lexical scopes of declarations of procedures/variables etc. you have a stack of symbol tables.
So we've got a tree (the AST), we've got a symbol table for the current scope (a hash table of <id, info> pairs), and we have a stack of symbol tables (a stack).
A tree, a hash table and a stack. Those are data structures. What more needs to be added to this definition to turn it from "data structures" into a "data model"?
Firstly this is a serious question, secondly I have a great deal of experience of defining data structures to solve problems, so I can't see what adding an abstract term is doing.
You could say that the extra something is the specification/maintenance of the correct interrelationship between those data structures (and I'd agree), and there's a word for that: it's called 'code'. I genuinely don't understand what you're getting at and I'd genuinely like to know.
And no answer :-( It does rather defeat the point of discussion here if people say things they won't back up. I don't know if I've changed your mind, you certainly haven't given me any reason to change mine, so why post?