Interoperable Information
Ted Habermann, The HDF Group
“A strong foundation is being built for sharing data and information to create community knowledge and wisdom. This foundation includes HDF5 as the data layer with community conventions and ISO metadata facilitating use and understanding.”
We have experienced so many monumental technological shifts during the last several decades that, like the diurnal cycle of light and dark, the technology life cycle (shown below) is becoming instinctual.
It starts with a new idea, (usually aimed at new customers), that destroys existing organizational expertise and threatens the continued existence of established processes and organizations. These disruptions raise a variety of difficult questions and initiate an Era of Ferment during which established enterprises gauge the impact of the disruption in their worlds and try to adjust. The ferment creates uncertainty, high risk, considerable wasted resources, and no interoperability.
The technology lifecycle
The ferment is ended when the community agrees on a dominant design and works together to make the design work. Instead of deciding what they are going to do, they work to make what they are going to do better.