It’s perhaps a little different with real data… do I care who measured the temperature at station 435 yesterday noon, as long as someone did? Well, for scientific purposes, I guess one would care, so the provenance is important. But for many ordinary purposes I think one would not care much, unless one found reasons to distrust those data, then chasing up the provenance would be an issue. (A colleague told me once he was annoyed how much the BBC’s weather forecasts for his home town differed from the Met Office forecast on which they were supposedly based… after parallel correspondences with someone in the Met Office and someone in the BBC, it became clear that the BBC’s parameters for identifying the town or otherwise selecting the data for the forecast were wrong, in other words the BBC had been passing off a forecast from somewhere else for years… apocryphal, alleged, etc).

There’s also different ways of things being “in the cloud”. Some services are hosted by EC2/S3 and so are “in the cloud”, but have perfectly “real-looking” URIs. Nothing wrong with doing the same thing for data

I’ve argued with Lorcan sometimes that “in the cloud” is not too meaningful, ditto “moving to the network level”. There’s real hardware, real servers, real OS’s providing these services. What the hell difference does it make from my hardware and servers. Maybe the only thing is, I don’t have to be bothered about some things that I used to have to worry about.

So, not knowing whether I’m agreeing with you or not, maybe the thing we want is data, as authoritative as we need, with provenance available, clearly identified. But _where_ it is? Am I bovvered?

You might as well check Brainwave Platform which has a schemaless database called Poseidon packed along with its complete development and deployment suite.

-Syd

While I like a cake as much as the next man I’m tending towards leaving the IE diagram alone, and I’m reluctant to simply try to replace it with an updated version. Having said that, the layers are interesting….