The Latest Data Action: Semantics, Hubs, and Standards

The action in the data industry continues unabated at breakneck speed with no end in site.  Most recently, however, a few activities in particular caught my attention:

ICANN domain expansion:  The semantic expansion of gTLDs, global top level domains (like .com, .org, .edu), fostered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN, offers Web businesses an entirely new way to brand and identify themselves.  But it also potentially produces extra work for web developers.  Check out my blog post over at EMA regarding how ICANN is helping developers.

OMG Industry Semantics:  The venerable Object Management Group, OMG, who brings the IT industry, among other standards, BPMN, CORBA, UML, and MDA – standards for business process notation, objects, and modeling/model driven architecture, have embarked in whole or in partnership on industry-specific semantic standards.  The most interesting to me, because of my 15 years as a developer and product manager in commercial banking, is FIBO, which stands for Financial Industry Business Ontology.  FIBO endeavors to standardize the formal language of banking, which should help a number of constituencies, including banks, technology suppliers, regulators, and hopefully thereby you and me.

Some have asserted that the financial debacle of 2008 would have been dealt with more effectively if the banking industry was talking literally out of the same side of its mouth in order for regulators and central banks to better measure risk across the banking system, and so that bankers would better understand their own risk.  While some politicians continue to kick the can down the road in terms producing a more trustworthy banking system, FIBO and related OMG efforts seem bent on doing something about the fundamentals.

Data Hubs:   Among some Hadoop distributors, this has been an important period to underscore the notion of a Data Hub.  Cloudera came out with its data hub recently, and I blogged about it and the notion of Data Hubs in my EMA blog The Promise of the Data Hub.  Given that the Strata conference is underway, it should come as no surprise that many vendors are making “major” announcements.  MapR, also one of the Hadoop originals, may have jumped the Strata field with its announcement of HP Vertica running on the MapR platform.  Here we see the marrying of the analytic platform (HP Vertica) with a, well, bank-grade data management platform or hub (MapR).  The net effect should drive interest in Vertica while laying down more Hadoop rails in many enterprises, hardened by MapR.

What should not be lost in this seeming random mix of ICANN, OMG, FIBO, HP Vertica, and MapR is how standards and open source permeate today’s data solutions.  While ICANN, OMG, and FIBO are in effect standards bodies, HP Vertica was originally a fork from the open source Postgres database, and MapR is based on open source Hadoop.  Leaning on standards and open source, finding the balance between transparency and security, usability yet dependability, while lowering costs remains the hazy yet key goal of the data industry