Hi John,
I hope you’re enjoying your holiday season. Thanks for the response and the info. Based on what you wrote, I believe we do disagree on one point. You stated:
But I don't believe that the new developments in technology change the fundamental issues about interoperability:
FG I would stress that technology has changed significantly since 2008, along with the massive growth in data volumes.
The basic issues were recognized and addressed in attempts to support interoperability since the conceptual schema work in the 1970s and ‘80s...
I would respectfully present that without the changes in technologies, most enterprises (and people) would “not” be dealing with the magnitudes, scales, and volumes of data and information that effect and directly impact considerations for interoperability, today, which were often ignored by many people, as little as 6 years ago.
In fact, I’ll give you a very specific and very common engineering example that has been around for decades… “signal crosstalk” (on circuit boards, on integrated circuits, between wires, etc.). At slow speeds with moderate signal strengths, there is little or negligible crosstalk. As clock speeds got faster and as signal drivers were able to yield higher signal strengths, crosstalk issues went “way up" across signal runs. It was advancements in technologies that made the crosstalk problems an issue for interoperability, when moving data from any one data silo to any other (chip to chip, board to board, system to system, etc.). In fact, every time a new chip library was delivered that had faster clock speeds and stronger signals, it changed many considerations for data interoperability. Factors like medium type, medium density, medium adjacency, transmission angles, and distance between end-points had to be considered. It goes on and on. As technologies progressed, they changed our way of looking at crosstalk problems. How we looked at and solved crosstalk problems 20 years ago was different than 15 years ago, which were both different than 10 years ago, and so on. In fact, I'd bet there isn’t an experienced digital electrical engineer who has worked on complex communications systems that hasn’t had to deal with new interoperability considerations due to new technology releases.
Another area is Big Data. Without the massive shifts in data volumes and speed of transfer that new technologies have afforded us, we would not be trying to solve interoperability problems in new ways. For example, Map Reduction paradigms are now available to the masses when, not long ago, they were only for more well funded technologists. Also, the newer technologies associated with Big Data force us to think far more often about things like ETL vs. ELT.
Very simply, while many new technologies open up new opportunities, they often also open up new problems that require new ways to think of solving them.
Anyhow, I hope the above helps explain my earlier statement.
My Best,
Frank
--
Frank Guerino, Chairman
The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT)
http://www.if4it.com
1.908.294.5191 (M)
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