General
October 30, 2008
Where have all the DBAs gone?
In the good old days, application developers had to go through relational database administrators to store their data. Being relatively few in number, DBAs inherently had a broader view of the organization's data and could generally be trusted to normalize redundancies across applications. Developers benefited from coherence and loose-coupling of data whether they realized it or not.
For better and worse, the relational model is giving way to the resource model of the web. As standards-based RESTful protocols like AtomPub and SRU are adapted, the opinion is growing that XML can be stored and indexed directly. The benefits should be obvious, except to note that the need for DBAs hasn't gone away. Although coherence and loose-coupling of code are obvious to developers, the coherence and loose-coupling of data across the organization is still a foreign concept. That has always been somebody else's problem. In this vacuum, overworked developers are destined to believe that "their" data is peculiar to their application and build XML Schemas for data storage accordingly.
Where is the new generation of XML DBAs that understand these problems and use the applicable tools like UML domain modeling? Will they have the authority and leadership ability to enforce a common domain model across applications? How many new XML-based silos will be created before the pain becomes unbearable?
July 4, 2008
Google Subscribed Links
If you look along the right hand side of the Q6 blog's home page, you should now see an annoyingly large button that immodestly says "Add my expertise to your Google web searches". (These would not be my first choices.) Clicking on this button, followed by another one, will install a "Subscribed Link" into your Google account.
From then on, if your browser is signed into your Google account, entries from the Q6 blog will quietly appear in the fourth position of your Google search results if your search terms match keywords I've specified. Currently, these keywords are limited to "OpenURL and "Q6", but beware that I could possibly go insane with these and make you scramble to figure out how to unsubscribe.
Jeff
[2008-07-24 Moved the fat ugly button to the right side of the display to conserve real estate]
July 2, 2008
Thought Identification
After taking off a year and a half from this blog, a few general thoughts occur to me.
A blog is the perfect place to record, analyze, develop, and share thoughts and ideas because it establishes their:
- Identity (via a blog entry's URI and HTML anchors)
- Location (via the centralized storage of blog entries)
- Description (via the semantics embedded in a blog entry)
- Rights (I "own" all of my thoughts, but certainly not necessarily the ideas therein)
- Chronology (unless I'm careless with date stamps when editing old entries)
- Persistence (I hope I can trust OCLC to preserve access to my blog entries)
- Coherence (I can at least try to make sense in my blog entries)
- Relatedness (e.g. via hotlinks and labels in my blog entries)
- Active and passive discoverability (via search engines and syndication)
- Serendipity (it is reasonable to imagine that even an erroneous blog entry could be a source of insight and inspiration for someone)
- and what other facets have I overlooked?
This is an impressive list that should not be taken for granted by us common folk. Even if I am the only person that ever sees the entries in this blog, this list still promises to make blogging a rewarding endeavor.
If anyone wonders about the relevance of this blog entry to OpenURL, remember that I'm primarily concerned about Q6 (who, what, where, why, when, and how). The URI for this blog entry makes for a perfectly reasonable Referent Identifier ("what"). If your favorite OpenURL Resolver can't do anything useful with it, you should start to wonder why.
|
