Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Importance of Data
Last May I got a chance to hear Tim O'Reilly speak at BEA's eWorld in Moscone. He spoke about how the value equation keeps evolving over time - initially it was in the hardware, later it moved to databases/operating systems, then to middleware/applications etc.. He thinks that now it is in the data. I think he is right. Collecting, manipulating, protecting data will be big business.
One of the challenges with sharing data is around the semantics of the data elements. This is a tough problem to address since the same terms may mean different things to different user segments. Some standard bodies (like the one for EDI etc.) have addressed pieces of it but it is no where near universal. Within corporations some companies have invested in Ontology tools to help define data and also as a side benefit automatically generate transformation scripts (either XSLT or XQuery). There is ofcourse nothing like this which is cross industry. While browsing through Adam Bosworth's blog I came across this link http://del.icio.us/ that lets you classify or tag web pages. I don't get all the import of this but this may very well end up being some kind of bottom up approach to this problem.
Last May I got a chance to hear Tim O'Reilly speak at BEA's eWorld in Moscone. He spoke about how the value equation keeps evolving over time - initially it was in the hardware, later it moved to databases/operating systems, then to middleware/applications etc.. He thinks that now it is in the data. I think he is right. Collecting, manipulating, protecting data will be big business.
One of the challenges with sharing data is around the semantics of the data elements. This is a tough problem to address since the same terms may mean different things to different user segments. Some standard bodies (like the one for EDI etc.) have addressed pieces of it but it is no where near universal. Within corporations some companies have invested in Ontology tools to help define data and also as a side benefit automatically generate transformation scripts (either XSLT or XQuery). There is ofcourse nothing like this which is cross industry. While browsing through Adam Bosworth's blog I came across this link http://del.icio.us/ that lets you classify or tag web pages. I don't get all the import of this but this may very well end up being some kind of bottom up approach to this problem.
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