Furthermore, ‘Open Access‘ and ‘Repository’ typically go hand in hand. If you support Open Access you need a repository, and if you question the role of repositories you’re in the pocket of evil publishers who want to lock up everything ever written and lease reading rights back to the employers of those who wrote the stuff in the first place.

Nonsense.

Open Access is an important component of today’s scholarly ecosystem. It’s not the only answer, and it’s not perfect, but it does have a significant part to play. Institutions have a role in preserving, disseminating and exploiting the work of their employees, but these are very different tasks that may benefit from different solutions. In too many cases, the repository is by default seen as a preservation mechanism and a dissemination vehicle, and as such it may fail to cost-effectively achieve either aim.

There are some large, well known, and research-intensive institutions where it might be possible to make a compelling argument for projecting a strong institutional image around a single ‘home’ for all of that research output. Never mind, for a moment, that so much research today is the result of inter-institutional collaboration, or that the eminent researcher might wish to take ‘their’ research publications with them as they move from Oxford to Harvard to York during their glittering career.

Alongside those institutions sit a plethora of others where research of equal quality is also being conducted; there just, maybe, isn’t quite as much of it. Bombarded by ‘advice’ and funding, and desperate to keep up with the Russell Group, ever-more institutions blindly join the repository cult and wonder why their new toys do not fill to overflowing with the jewels of scholarly erudition.

As research becomes increasingly data-rich, the whole cycle looks set to repeat. The recently released Panton Principles for Open Data in Science are to be welcomed, but I’ll bet the institutional response will all too often be the commissioning of a ‘data repository’ to sit alongside the ‘publication repository’ they already don’t use.

All of which is a rather long-winded way of introducing the fact that Eduserv’s Andy Powell has asked me to facilitate a breakout afternoon on ‘Policy Issues’ at the Repositories in the Cloud event Eduserv and JISC are holding in London on Tuesday.

“This free event, organised jointly by Eduserv and the JISC, will bring together software developers, repository managers, service providers, funding and advisory bodies to discuss the potential policy and technical issues associated with cloud computing and the delivery of repository services in UK HEIs.”

In a post on 11 February, Andy invited participants to share some of their views ahead of the meeting, and on 19 February he wrote about some of his own thoughts.

Like Andy, I struggled somewhat to nail down a coherent set of thoughts about the issue of pushing today’s repositories into the Cloud. On one level, I wonder whether the vast majority of institutions with small (and relatively low traffic) repositories would see much of a tangible efficiency gain or cost saving by moving off an in-house computer to rent an equivalent Virtual Machine from Amazon, Rackspace, or any of their competitors. If we’re talking about IT systems within a typical university, there are others (email, calendaring, pools of compute resource for research jobs, etc) that appear more immediately compelling for the shift Cloud-ward. Which is not to say that there isn’t a clear opportunity for someone trusted to step into this space and offer a SaaS repository to which institutions might affordably subscribe. Eduserv? Mimas? Edina? The British Library? The National Archives? Duraspace? Any could, and if we’re not ready for something more then at least one probably should.

However, a bolder reconsideration of what repositories are and what they’re for might very well lead to something interesting, sustainable, and perfectly suited for benefitting from Cloud Computing’s strengths.

Why does a paper have to be ‘deposited’ in a repository? Why does a single paper with three authors from three institutions have to be deposited in three separate institutional repositories? Why does that same paper have to be deposited – separately – in the subject repository favoured by scholars in the relevant discipline? Why does the institution’s very reasonable desire to protect, preserve, promote and disseminate its excellence mean that it has to run systems in perpetuity that preserve and permit access? Why do we address the fundamentally different (perhaps even contradictory) problems of access and preservation in the same system? Why can’t the individual researcher easily assemble a view across their publication history, regardless of the institution within which they happened to reside as they wrote each paper? Why don’t the assemblages of papers reflect personal, professional and disciplinary relationships, alongside (or instead of) the contractual accident of employee-employer relationships? Why isn’t the wealth of metadata implicit to any publication (authors, subjects, dates, citations, and more) available and actionable, both inside the repository and far beyond it across the Web? Why isn’t there a tight and active association between the paper and the data from which its findings were derived (something for which Internet Archaeology was demonstrating utility a very long time ago)?

Scholarly papers principally comprise text, augmented by the occasional static image. They’re not big, and they don’t tend to change very fast. In many ways, they represent a fairly easy problem set with which to work. As more and more data becomes key to research in a growing number of subject areas, the problems are set to become far larger and far more difficult. For individual universities to even consider replicating the process by which they all ended up with their repositories of text surely seems madness in this data-rich environment. Even with levels of uptake as low as those seen in too many text repositories, the issues of data management, curation, access and dissemination are too great to be sensibly solved in the institutional machine room. Services like InfoChimps and Amazon’s own Public Data Sets offering show some of the ways that we might begin to work with data at scale. Might we, for example, come to recognise as Amazon has that it’s actually cheaper and quicker to entrust large data sets to FedEx rather than transmit them over the Internet?

‘The answer’ might be some central service for the community, funded by JISC like the Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS) of old. Or it might be something different, something nimbler, more responsive, more flexible to individual, institutional, and disciplinary requirements, and something more scalable to new disciplines; institutional support for and use of existing Cloud infrastructures extending far beyond UK Higher Education, aligned with a clear understanding of the separation between preservation and access.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I do believe that simply asking whether or not we should move existing repositories to the Cloud is to miss the point. Rather, we should ask what role the Cloud might play in addressing the business requirements to which the institutional repository was our initial – faltering – response. The answer might very well be ‘None,’ but I doubt it.

I look forward to Tuesday’s discussion. I’m not going there to push my personal view that individual institutions frequently shouldn’t be building, running or populating their own repositories at all. I’m going there to facilitate the discussion those in the room want to have, and to learn from their experiences and their perspectives.

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Carr blogged on Friday, noting that video from the event has been made available on YouTube, and I’ve been steadily working through the material ever since.

Krish followed up on CloudAve with his take, flagging Carr’s presentation as of particular interest. I liked Carr’s presentation too (although prefer our podcast, as I think he went deeper there), and found much to value in most of the other talks as well.

My particular highlights, I think, were three sessions later in the day;

Paul Cheesbrough (CIO at Telegraph Media Group), Francois Blanc (CIO at Valeo), Todd Pierce (SVP & CIO at Genentech) and Andy Beale (CIO at Guardian Media Group) participated in a panel session (embedded below) to discuss their real-world experiences of rolling Google Apps out across large organisations. The key take-aways? Benefit won’t be recognised across the board until six months in, and Executive Assistants need to be kept on-side as their day-to-day work inside people’s calendars is disrupted… and they’re both ‘loud’ and ‘influential.’

Google’s Dave Girouard covered similar issues from the company’s perspective, and is clearly someone to add to my list of podcast targets.

My final highlight was Geoffrey Moore (he of Core, Context, and Chasms), applying some of his broader business ideas to the Cloud. I’d certainly like to explore some of his arguments a little further another day…

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The company was founded in 2003, and is currently profitable with some thirty employees, no debt and no external financing.

According to Malviya, the team set out to create a multi-tenant Platform optimised for the easy creation of web-based applications, but their first public offering was a SaaS CRM application devoted to the media industry. That application is still running today, and is used by more than 150 enterprise customers.

The Platform followed in September 2007, exclusively as a hosted offering from LongJump’s partner data centres, and Malviya perceives it as in direct competition to Salesforce.com’s Force.com. With extensive support for common protocols and communications specifications such as REST, SOAP, Java and XML, and a common security framework throughout, Malviya argues that an application Platform such as the one his company offers is important in overcoming what he describes as the

“Enterprise tendency to develop one-off apps… and then expect IT to support them.”

He argues that business users are able to take a degree of control over their own application needs, whilst reassuring the CIO and IT Team that everything is running on top of a single set of secure infrastructure over which they have control.

Today, that same Platform is being made available on an annual subscription basis for local installation behind the firewall, as well as being offered to a range of third party hosting companies whom Malviya hopes will brand and resell the software to their own customers. According to Malviya, two (unnamed) service providers have already agreed to resell the Platform, and details will no doubt be forthcoming as they get up to speed.

As the LongJump corporate site notes,

“LongJump BAP for Enterprises addresses a major gap in next generation application platforms designed solely for the public web. Information that is sensitive or subject to regulatory issues is relegated to sitting on a custom application built internally, adding to a level of complexity and management that neither scales nor adapts well with changing requirements. Because LongJump BAP for Enterprises sits inside your own datacenter, its applications and platform are ideal for organizations tasked with managing [sensitive] information”

And, crucially,

“In addition, applications can be packaged for migration from one LongJump deployed instance to another. For example, development can take place in a cloud deployment and be deployed in production in a corporation’s data center.”

This will, of course, be crucial in allowing flexible movement between different environments as requirements, capacity and resources change.

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Salesforce.com

More recently the company has begun to diversify from its heritage as the provider of an on-demand CRM application, seeking to nurture an ecosystem of add-ons and enhancements through the AppExchange and offering third party developers access to the underlying Force.com Platform.

In an effort to understand the company’s views on the evolving SaaS and PaaS markets I recently spoke with VP for Developer Marketing, Adam Gross, and the result has just been released as a podcast.

Show notes available on Talis‘ Nodalities blog

Delivery of both application and platform could create significant tensions, as business decisions made to advance the application potentially cannibalise revenue from the platform ecosystem, and vice versa. We discuss some of these issues during the conversation, with Adam going so far as to suggest that ‘nothing would stop’ a third party using Force.com to build an application that competed directly with Salesforce itself.

Have a listen, and see what you think.

Image of Adam Gross © Salesforce.com

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The event was organised by London consultancy firm BroadGroup, and ably Chaired by Tim Jackson. BroadGroup were also pitching their (possibly valuable) new report on ‘the rise and meaning of Cloud Computing,’ but even with my £100 attendee’s discount the £995/ £1,295 price tag is a little too steep for me to buy and review a copy here.

Travel delays meant that I missed the pre-lunch sessions on the first day; ‘Making Money from Cloud Computing’ and ‘Corporate IT & Cloud Computing.’ Luckily (for me, at least), opening keynoter JP Rangaswami was also delayed, and I did manage to hear him later in the day. More on that later, but for the sake of completeness here are the abstracts for the sessions I didn’t manage to record myself;

Making Money from Cloud Computing

“The Cloud represents a wide range of service models from SaaS and storage and server capacity to consumer services. Measuring the costs associated with Cloud computing brings with it a range of variables beyond standard data centre colo space and power. The pattern of demand and usage behaviour and the opportunity cost of and required speed to scale for example, represent key factors to consider. In achieving ROI therefore, how quickly will Cloud be adopted? Which market segments will represent critical targets for Cloud services? Is the economic downturn a catalyst for Cloud? Who will be the key enablers? Where will value and competitive advantage be found? Will Cloud disrupt the licensed software model? What are the business models for Cloud, how do they differ and how will they be monetized?”

Corporate IT & Cloud Computing

“With increasing globalization and mobility, as well as escalating competitive forces and productivity requirements, corporations of all sizes have started to rethink how they should operate. This process is accelerating as the current downturn continues to impact revenues. How quickly will Cloud be adopted in the Enterprise? How difficult will it be for enterprises to switch from one Cloud provider to another? Is lock-in more likely? Which Cloud solutions will prove the best fit for large enterprises and how quickly will Cloud technologies accelerate efficiencies that deliver bottom line results at a time of economic downturn? Or, is Cloud Computing just another tool in the IT box?”

Finance, Investors & Cloud Computing

After lunch, Alexis Richardson of Cohesive FT, Greg Marsh of Index Ventures and Duncan Johnston-Watt of Cloudsoft shared their views on key opportunities for investors in the Cloud.

Alexis began by discussing discussing the economic disruption posed by adoption of Cloud Computing, but warned that Gartner‘s Trough of Disillusionment is not far ahead of us with so many organisations today ‘massively over-promising on the Cloud.’ He suggested that adoption of Cloud Computing is ‘mostly a US phenomenon’ just now, with Europe allegedly ’18 months behind.’

“Independence from the computer is a bigger market opportunity than the adoption of the PC in the first place.”

Clouds are seeing ‘plenty of adoption’ from consumers and small business lured by the flexibility, scalability and on-demand pricing. Despite 58% of CIOs at larger organisations feeling that Cloud Computing will ’cause a radical shift,’ enterprise adoption tends to be more cautious.

Alexis characterised the two extremes, suggesting that consumers and small businesses are welcoming the Cloud, saying

“Yes we can!”

Large enterprises, on the other hand, remain more cautious, tending to

“Just say ‘No!’”

Next up was Greg Marsh, who reminded the audience that Index Ventures is an early stage venture firm, established in 1996, and currently with $2bn under management. Most of their portfolio is in Europe, and includes well-known names such as Love Film, Skype, Last.fm and MySQL. In the Cloud space, RightScale is one of their investments.

Greg suggested that ‘Cloud’ is a broad term that includes many innovations from ‘Grid done right’ to Software as a Service, but stressed that investors are looking for a number of things before giving their money to a new prospect;

• smart teams
• pursuit of opportunities that are massively scalable
• low capital intensity
• market savvy
• A Big Idea

In discussion a member of the audience posed an interesting question, asking whether there were ‘problems of scale’ to counter the ‘economies of scale’ often cited for Cloud-based infrastructure and services. Many of Google’s services, for example, might simply remain in beta because it’s impossible to define and deliver the sorts of reliability and up-time that we would expect from a commercial service. Whilst these services are generally extremely reliable across the board, the reliance upon large numbers of machines in numerous data centres running innumerable processes makes it extremely likely that someone is going to receive a bad service… and there’s very little that Google et al can do about it.

Image via Wikipedia

JP Rangaswami

BT Design’s MD for Innovation & Strategy, JP Rangaswami, then delivered his delayed keynote and began by reminding the audience of Gartner’s definition of Cloud Computing. Broadly, he paraphrased, Gartner stress delivery of service,  scalable elasticity,  multi-tenancy and  a basis in open standards. For those unable to access Gartner’s reports, one of the authors recently did some public paraphrasing of his own.

All of these, Rangaswami argued, were available and understood a decade or more ago.

A theme running through Rangaswami’s presentation – and the final panel of the day – was the suggestion that many potential beneficiaries of Cloud Computing are in danger of being left behind;

“while we pretend the Cloud isn’t happening, while we bring up excuses of security, latency, governance… there are the new Googles and the new Amazons building out… because they don’t care.”

Whilst agreeing that the guarantees and assurances offered by Service Level Agreements, due diligence and contracts can be important,

“let’s not waste time worrying about [the lack of an SLA]. What’s really exciting is today’s equivalent of Google or Amazon or eBay… looking at what’s available today and extending it”

He pointed to the example of Animoto, able to scale rapidly thanks to their use of Cloud infrastructure;

“They weren’t agonising over Governance… they just did it.  25,000 users to 250,000 users. 50 instances to 3,000+ instances in three days.”

Rangaswami suggested that three characteristics make Cloud Computing different to the individually similar technologies preceding it;

• it’s about mobile;
• it’s about data (from ‘data centre’ to ‘data centric’);
• it’s about different values.

“The opportunities look different today. The next Google will be invented by a guy with a credit card. No Venture Capital. No capital needed.

The ‘boring’ issues don’t go away… but they can be dealt with later…”

Technologies & Cloud Computing

The final session of the day explored Technologies and Cloud Computing, where JP and I joined Rightscale CEO Mike Crandell and Amazon Web Services Evangelist Simone Brunozzi on the stage. I was too busy participating to take notes, but felt like it went well.

Day Two: Infrastructure & Cloud Computing

Missing the first session on ‘Consumers & Cloud Computing’ for a conference call, my Day Two began with a panel comprising Xcalibre CEO Tony Lucas, Quest Software‘s European CTO Joe Baguley, Endeavors Technologies‘ CTO Arthur Hitomi, Telkom SA‘s David Lupafya and Alog Data Centres Do Brasil‘s President Sidney Breyer.

Tony talked about the lack of spare capacity to power new data centres in and around London, and pointed to the benefits of off-shoring new data centres to Iceland where power and cooling are plentiful, investment money is welcome, and network links are excellent.

“Is UK investment in the network actually to ensure we can reach our own content, off-shored to places where it can be stored and managed more efficiently?”

David spoke knowledgeably about the rather different situation in southern Africa, illustrating challenges facing the area whilst also demonstrating situations in which infrastructure and practice is actually moving beyond the ‘more developed’ countries of the world.

Privacy, Regulation, Security and Cloud Computing

In a session that delved into the morass of complex legal issues surrounding the movement and storage of data, we learned that ‘choice of law’ clauses in contracts may not be worth the paper upon which they are printed, that European Data Protection laws may be difficult to enforce upon sub-contractors of sub-contractors of sub-contractors in a contract, and of the Affero Clause’s importance in protecting the rights of Cloud developers. Welcome relief from the language of law came in the form of HP Labs‘ Miranda Mowbray, who managed to repeatedly and relevantly link her discussion of legal issues to The Hound of the Baskervilles; complete with readings and foggy slides.

‘Icy Tube Sign‘ image © Sheila Thomson, 2009.

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Driving home last night, listening to podcasts from the BBC, The Guardian and John Willis, I began to wonder about the ‘inevitability’ of Open Source in the Enterprise. I shared the initial idea on Twitter and had some useful responses overnight;

“Thought; Open & Closed Source coexist well in enterprise. BUT once you deploy Open Source tool can you ever get budget back for Closed ver?”

Conversation was clearly constrained by Twitter’s 140 character limit, and several respondents (incorrectly, but understandably) assumed that I was simply suggesting Open Source Software to be cheaper. It may be, but it doesn’t have to be. And that wasn’t the point.

For the avoidance of doubt, let me first expand upon that brief tweet in order to clarify what I meant. Then we can explore the issues in a little more depth and see whether the premise holds water.

Thankfully, we appear to have moved beyond the ridiculous polarisation of recent years that saw Open Source evangelists square off against Microsoft junkies and other proponents of closed source proprietary solutions. Naive notions that ‘free’ software would not cost anything to deploy and maintain have faded from the conversation, enabling growth in for-profit ventures to support deployment of all that ‘free’ software. In essence, we have reached (or are rapidly approaching?) a healthy balance; a point at which Open and Closed Source solutions co-exist within many Enterprises, with each solution selected on its merits rather than for the flavour if its religious dogma.

So far, so good; and it is against this background that my question should be considered.

The essence of my question, actually, isn’t one of Open versus Closed at all. The essence is about budgets and politics, and the ways in which organisations manage them. A traditional on-premise installation of proprietary software is generally held to be a Capital item in the budget. It’s a single – and sizeable – allocation of funds once every 3-7 years that results in ‘ownership’ of an asset. Even if an Open Source deployment actually ends up costing almost the same over the lifetime of the installation, the vast majority of those costs are in terms of people who are either employed or brought in as contractors from outside. Those people are recurring items of expenditure in the budget; smaller amounts, more often.

In choosing to procure a new piece of software, it probably doesn’t ‘matter’ whether it’s Open or Closed. Instead, the decision should (correctly) be made in terms of the ability of the chosen solution to meet a set of business requirements. Sometimes the best solution will be closed source, sometimes it will be open.

But once an enterprise has opted for an Open Source solution, various internal considerations take over;

• the budget holder (probably) gains a number of staff dedicated to supporting and customising the new solution, either on the payroll or as external consultants. The size of the budget holder’s empire grows visibly larger;
• the CFO sees the unpleasant pain of large Capital investments removed from their books, replaced by a more manageable steady trickle of recurring costs each and every year.

At that point, I’d argue, it must effectively be impossible to turn back from an Open Source solution to a future Closed Source replacement. The switching costs, perceived loss of ‘power’ and perceived hit to a bottom line accustomed to the steadiness of recurring costs all combine to dissuade numerous stakeholders from making the switch away from Open Source. Any proprietary competitor would have to be far better than both the incumbent and all the other Open Source alternatives to stand any chance at all, and in a mature software world where most applications are actually pretty comparable that seems unlikely in the extreme.

So, I’d propose, the decision to move to Open Source is actually made on a reasonably level playing field but the decision to move away from Open Source takes place in an environment so stacked against Closed Source that it’s unlikely to happen. If that is true, we will see a gradual movement of various Enterprise applications towards Open Source as purchasers select each application on its merits (inevitably, some proportion of those will be Open Source). However, we’ll see almost no movement the other way, leading to the eventual dominance of Open Source across the Enterprise. QED. Or maybe not?

And, for some reason, my background in Archaeology comes bubbling to the fore, offering the Roman Army’s fossa punica as an analogy; you can get in [to Open Source], but you can’t easily get out.

An email conversation this morning suggests that vendors of Closed Source solutions are aware of the threat, at least subconsciously. Rhys Wilkins, for example, pointed to the relatively low incentive for piecemeal replacement of software from companies such as Microsoft that tend to bundle ‘desirable’ and less desirable products together in packages. Their customers are prepared to continue paying for the desirable products (Exchange, say) and as they have to keep paying for the bundle whether they use all of its pieces or not there is a disincentive to gradually bring in alternative offerings.

Hosted subscription applications (SaaS) such as Salesforce only serve to confuse this picture still further. They’re not Open Source by any means, but in budgetary terms this new generation of subscription software is a recurring rather than Capital item of expenditure. Will we therefore (as Justin Leavesley suggested in an email) effectively see a race between those trying to push Open Source Software into the Enterprise and those trying to evangelise the benefits of entrusting previously internalised processes and applications to proprietary Clouds? And what happens when Open Source meets Open Data and the Cloud, and some of today’s proprietary silos begin to leak out onto the open Web?

But that, I think, is probably the subject of a subsequent post.

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Those podcasts have tended to focus specifically on the Semantic Web, but we’re keen to broaden that scope a bit to tackle a wider set of the issues facing those seeking to run data-powered businesses out on the Web. SaaS, PaaS, Cloud Computing and the rest are clearly vital pieces in that particular jigsaw.

So watch out for a broader set of topics in those podcasts, and thanks to Duane for his time in getting things kicked off yesterday. Do have a listen, and let us know what you think…

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Almost tangential to the main thrust of Warfield’s post, he writes;

“There are two ways the SaaS world tackles [the problem of making enterprise software applications flexible]–for some problems metadata is the answer, and for other problems end user-approachable self-service customization works.  Let me give some examples of each.

Metadata is literally ‘data about data‘.  As such, it is a beautiful thing.  Let’s consider the database.  It is very common for different organizations to want to be able to customize the database to their own purposes.  Let’s say you have a record that keeps information about your customers.  A lot of this information will be common, and could be standardized.  We all want the customer’s name, their address, phone number, and perhaps a few other things.  But then there will also be a lot of things that differ from one organization to the next.  Perhaps one wants to assign a specific sales person to each customer.  Another wants to record that customer’s birthday (obviously this is a much smaller organization than the first!).  And so on.  Without metadata, each database has to be customized and changed.  With metadata, rather than changing each database, you build the idea of custom fields in, and then you can just tell the database what the custom fields will be in each case but the structure needn’t change.  Metadata is not unique to SaaS, but it is an important part of the ‘multitenant’ concept.  It makes it possible for all those tenants to live in the same database, but still get to have all their custom fields.

Metadata can also make it possible to enable that second method for flexibility.  Customizing a database without metadata is going to require someone to get into the database, modify the schema, make sure reports are modified to deal with the new schema, make sure the schema changes don’t break the product, and on and on.  Such work is definitely the province of expensive and highly technical experts.  However, once we have metadata, we can create a simple user interface that lets almost anyone add new fields, and that handles all the rest of it automatically.  Suddenly we have made what had been a difficult and expensive technical task approachable in a self-service way by non-technical customers.  Not only that, but they can make these changes quickly and easily, and they can even iterate on them until they get it just right.”

‘Metadata’, eh? I remember the times I spent, back in the Nineties, travelling a world that seemed in thrall to massively over-complicated taxonomies, cataloguing rules and data structures, evangelising the benefits of a more light-weight approach to the description of resources. The assertion that metadata was ‘data about data’ appeared in just about every presentation, closely followed (when talking to librarians, at least) by ‘it is sort of like cataloguing.’

Enter Grigorovici, and his discussion of an old post by Glenn McDonald. As Dan notes, Glenn doesn’t seem particularly keen on ‘metadata;’

“There is no such thing as ‘metadata’. Everything is relative. Everything is data. Every bit of data is meta to everything else, and thus to nothing. It doesn’t matter whether the map ‘is’ the terrain, it just matters that you know you’re talking about maps when you’re talking about maps. (And it usually doesn’t matter if the computer knows the difference, regardless…)”

So, two views of metadata that are apparently contradictory. Yet I pretty much agree with both of them, actually.

Returning to the Nineties, and the rather ridiculous pinnacle of my Gold status with a plethora of the world’s airlines, the “metadata is ‘data about data’” truism was often closely followed by “one person’s data is another person’s metadata” (or vice versa, of course).

Here, as elsewhere, there can be a depressing tendency to seek polarisation; to make things simple by declaring everything either black or white. Grey is anathema, and to be hunted down for exposure to ridicule almost as biting as that directed at proponents of the pole opposite to your own. The reality is, of course, that grey is frequently the norm. The world is a complex place, and one in which a spectrum of views and ‘truths’ is necessary in helping us to make sense of the confusion that bombards all of our senses throughout every waking moment.

An overly dogmatic attempt to categorise some things as always being metadata and others as always data is pointless. Whilst Glenn forcefully argues that there is therefore no such thing as metadata, I would push back just as forcefully to say that any data can be considered metadata; in the right context.

That detailed and structured description of the new car after which you lust is a perfectly valid set of data. In a different context, and perhaps as a surrogate for the car itself, it can more usefully by characterised as metadata.

A database of flight codes, routes, times and aircraft is rich with data just begging to be used in a plethora of ways, whilst ‘BA283′ is equally comfortable as a piece of metadata describing one airline’s afternoon flight from London to Los Angeles.

The concept of metadata can be an extremely useful one; so long as we avoid becoming too dogmatic in defining its boundaries or fervid in upholding spurious conceptual purity.

Hillmann’s Real Metadata © Jeffrey Beall 2007, and shared on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

Have a read, and see what you think.

I spoke to Sinclair recently, ahead of today’s announcement of their SaaSGrid offering, and there’s plenty more to share from that conversation when I get to it in my task list!

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Peter Whitehead’s ‘Editors’ Note‘ went online this afternoon, ahead of its appearance in print tomorrow.

No great surprises there although Jim Hietala’s piece, Don’t cloud your vision, surely deserves reading and responding to.