Build Roads not Stagecoaches by Martin Fenner.
Describing Eric Hysen’s keynote, Martin says:
In his keynote he described how travel from Cambridge to London in the 18th and early 19th century improved mainly as a result of better roads, made possible by changes in how these roads are financed. Translated to today, he urged the audience to think more about the infrastructure and less about the end products:
Ecosystems, not apps
— Eric Hysen
On Tuesday at csv,conf, Nick Stenning – Technical Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation – talked about data packages, an evolving standard to describe data that are passed around betwen different systems. He used the metaphor of containers, and how they have dramatically changed the transportation of goods in the last 50 years. He argued that the cost of shipping was in large part determined by the cost of loading and unloading, and the container has dramatically changed that equation. We are in a very similar situation with datasets, where most of the time is spent translating between different formats, joining things together that use different names for the same thing [emphasis added], etc.
“…different names for the same thing.”
Have you heard that before? 😉
But here is the irony:
When I thought more about this I realized that these building blocks are exactly the projects I get most excited about, i.e. projects that develop standards or provide APIs or libraries. Some examples would be
- ORCID: unique identifiers for scholarly authors
OK, but many authors already have unique identifiers in DBLP, Library of Congress, Twitter, and at places I have not listed.
Nothing against ORCID, but adding yet another identifier isn’t all that helpful.
A mapping between identifiers, so having one means I can leverage the others, now that is what I call infrastructure.
You?