Data management and Web2.0
After a few months of data architecture I notice that my original thoughts of using the paradigms of Web 2.0 have moved slowly a bit more to the background. Still I have to remind myself how we can move away from 'old' centralistic thinking to enabling the 'new' collaborative content creation model.I think there are several roles for data management in enabling this transaction, but the more I think about it, the more I know that this is not a simple journey.
First of all I think that data management can play a major role in establishing a services oriented architecture that will move the complexity of data storage and data integration towards the background. If the provision of quality data becomes like infrastructure, than the usage will become more natural and will enable easier collaboration. But this requires a lot of work related to moving the complexity to the background and establishing good old data mgt processes for creating proper quality data in the right master source (so not really webby2.0)
Second - I need to fight for opening up the management of Meta data to the 'masses'. Why not publish this as a wiki? I have already started piloting this with our main data management principles (and soon the architecture principles should follow as well) and for me it already starts to work. A wiki is relatively easy to maintain, it can link to anything and it is very accessible. On the first point (maintenance) I see one downside - it is not easy to automate. Some structured content is just easier maintained in a database. Maybe this is an idea for a further development of the wiki (a wikidb based on MySQL, where structure content like standard picklists can be managed). On the second point (linking) I only see upsides - a lot of content I do not have to invent myself - it is already there! and this also helps the accessibility. Many anti-wiki people fear for the lack of 'control' of a wiki, but I see that the audit trail feature and the 'official' nature of the publishing mechanism helps to keep the content professional.
Another thing worth pushing is the use of Blogging and Indexing in environments where data is interpreted. Should we really keep an audit trail of everything if users can keep a Blog of what they've done and Indexing provides the basis of search and ranking mechanisms towards the right content? Should we introduce Search on top of structure data?
Finally I think that the idea of collaboration environments are a good principle for many data management paradigms. Maybe not for transaction processing (that's all about control), but for interpretation environments, research & development contexts and engineering it makes sense to organise information more related to workgroups and less to 'corporate control'.
Labels: web services, Web2.0, wiki
posted by Evert Ruijs @ 11:38 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home