I co-chair this standard about Data Formats, describing them to insure interoperability and such. I posted about this previously.
I just wanted to advise folks that DFDL (Data Format Description Language) efforts are being accelerated by major vendors of late. So this standard is no longer languishing in the slow efforts of devoted committee members working extra hours outside their day jobs. People are really being paid now to make this reality.
I am frankly thrilled to see this finally happen. DFDL is important to interoperability, high performance computing, and bridging the very rich legacy of computing to the future where the data will be everywhere providing new value to businesses!
There's this whole problem with data in enterprises. IT shops have governed and taken stewardship over it ... to death. Most enterprises can't actually do data governance well, nor data stewardship - how many people understand the difference? (Hint: Good data governance requires people to be good data stewards. Yeah, ok, but what does that mean?) How many organizations can afford to dedicate people's time and attention to these issues?
Just extracting data from many systems is HARD. That's where DFDL comes in. Forget about being stewards of data.... How about getting it into the hands of people who can properly interpret and infer things from it? Yes, it cannot be trash if people are to interpret it. But it needn't be perfect either!
Reality: most businesses need to give data over to outside organizations who will give back to them information providing valuable business insight. Trying to govern use of data too much is just silly. Failure of imagination - you can't anticipate everything that can be learned from your data.
Warning/Caveats/Alert: Keep data privacy rules and security in mind....but outside of that, let the data go!
GMTFD is my new acronym. By analogy to the now legendary (at least on T-shirts) acronym RTFM, my acronym stands for "Give Me the Freakin' Data".
Given data, smart outside organizations can provide businesses with just incredible insights that would simply be unavailable if they tried to do this work in-house. (www.oco-inc.com)
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