A thought on Hard vs Soft by Dru Sellers starts off with:
With the move from RDBMS to NoSQL are we seeing the same shift that we saw when we moved from Hardware to Software. Are we seeing a shift from Harddata to Softdata? (emphasis in original)
See his post for the rest of the post and the replies.
Do topic maps address a similar hardIdentification vs. softIdentification?
By hardIdentification I mean a single identification.
But it goes further than that doesn’t it?
There isn’t even a single identification in most information systems.
Think about it. You and I both see the same column names and have different ideas of what they mean.
I remember reading in Doan’s dissertation (see Auditable Reconciliation) that a schema reconciliation project would have taken 12 person years but for the original authors being available.
We don’t have any idea what has been identified in most systems and no way to compare it to other “identifications.”
What is this? Write once, Wonder Many Times (WOWMT)?
So, topic maps really are a leap from nonIdentification to multiIdentification.
No wonder it is such a hard sell!
People aren’t accustomed to avoiding the cost of nonIdentification and here we are pitching the advantages of multiIdentification.
Pull two tables at random for your database and have a contest to see who outside the IT department can successfully identify what the column headers represent. No data, just the column headers.*
What other ways can we illustrate the issue of nonIdentification?
Interested in hearing your suggestions.
*****
*I will be posting column headers from public data sets and asking you to guess their identifications.
BTW, some will argue that documentation exists for at least some of these columns.
True enough, but from a processing standpoint it may as well be on a one way mission to Mars.
If the system doesn’t have access to it, it doesn’t exist. (full stop)
Gives you an idea of how impoverished our systems truly are.
IBM’s Watson (the computer, not IBM’s founder, who was also soulless) has been described as deaf and blind. Not only that, but it has no more information than it is given. It cannot ask for more. The life of pocket calculator, if it had emotions, is sad.