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It’s been a little while since my last post, and a lot has been going on since then.

First things first, based on the results of our little GML vs. KML vs. ?? poll and some other feedback and homework we did on the topic, the decision was made to natively support KML for our data import/export features to be included in the upcoming release of our data warehouse.  We also came to the conclusion that we should also include ESRI shapefile import support due to the large volumes of data out in the wild that are already in this format.  This certainly doesn’t preclude any other formats being supported down the road, but we feel that this combination will give us the most bang for our buck, so to speak.

We’ve been getting quite a lot of feedback from various sources about the data warehouse and the general notion of community driven, collaborative data management.  Bob Zurek at IBM specifically pointed us out as an example of the direction that data and information management is going.

I’d also like to tip my hat in the direction of Swivel, who lots of you have probably read about and seen by now.  It’s great to see more and more people and companies going in this direction.

Sean did a great job in his last post of outlining our basic thoughts and motivations behind our data warehouse project, and we’re certainly not the only ones who face such challenges.  But I’d like to delve a little bit more into what I see as the next steps for such technologies to take, and the sorts of things that we might expect to see in the future, and that I hope FortiusOne can be a part of.

Read on for my thoughts (warning: some buzzwords ahead)

Technorati Tags: data repository, geodata, KML

The past few decades have seen some amazing advances in technology that have reshaped our ideas about how things can, and should be done.

But over the years, no matter what sort of project I’ve been working on, there’s one fundamental thing that always ultimately ends up being the root of most of the technical challenges associated with it — data.

In many ways, this will probably always be true.  But there are things that can be done to at least partially alleviate the data bottleneck.

Obviously, we at FortiusOne, and many others, feel that community driven, collaborative data management is the first key piece in this puzzle.

But what then?  Do we just have multiple separate, but similar data repositories out in the wild that we go to when we need data?  At first, yes, probably.  It’s certainly an improvement.

More importantly, how do we use that data once we have it?  It’s a two-way street, your analysis is only as good as your data, but your data only shows its true worth through effective usage.

What I’m proposing is some sort of data warehouse/data community federation.  I’m certainly not the first to come up with this idea, but I do feel very strongly that something like it is the next step in solving “the data problem.”

Once we have the multiple community-driven, collaborative data repositories out in the wild, some effort will need to be undertaken in order to use that data together in a meaningful way.

I don’t know what form this will take, but right now I’m thinking along the lines of ‘data mashups,’ to use a common buzzword (actually, let’s just call it “Data 2.0” and be done with it).

I will tell you what form it can’t take — a 600 page long drawn-out spec that takes 2 years to come out of committee as a recommendation.  Whatever the solution is will need to be simple, flexible, and accessible.

Some of the pieces are out there, we have established and well understood mechanisms for creating lightweight service oriented architectures, we have XML for describing various disparate data sources, and we have all the people on the internet who have been driving the current Web 2.0/mashup phenomenon.  Maybe those particular pieces aren’t the right tools for the job, maybe they are.  If any of the current technologies out there would detract from the overall aim of simplicity, flexibility, and accessibility, we shouldn’t be afraid to craft new tools that do fit the bill.

All in all, I think 2007 will be a very interesting time in this space, and I certainly look forward to FortiusOne being involved in it in any way possible.

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