I ran across a depressing quote today on data virtualization:
But data is distributed, heterogeneous, and often full of errors. Simply federating it insufficient. IT organizations must build a single, accurate, and consistent view of data, and deliver it precisely when it’s needed. Data virtualization needs to take this complexity into account.*
It is very important to have a single view of data for some purposes, but what happens when circumstances change and we need a different view than the one before?
Without explicit identification of subjects, all the IT effort that went into the first data integration project gets repeated in the next data integration project.
You would think that after sixty years of data migration, largely repeating the efforts of prior migrations, even business types would have caught on by this point.
Without explicit identification of subjects, there isn’t any way to “know” what subjects were being identified. Or to create reliable new mappings. So the cycle of data migrations goes on and on.
Break the cycle of data migrations, choose topic maps!
*Look under webinars at: http://www.informatica.com/Pages/index.aspx There wasn’t a direct link that I could post to lead you to the quote.