Once Upon a Time in the Data

“Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a moocow coming down along the road, and this moocow that was coming down along the road, met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . .”

That is the opening line from the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

This novel’s unstructured data can be quite challenging, especially the opening chapter since it is written from the perspective of a young child discovering both the world and the words used to describe it.

Harry Levin, editor of a collection of Joyce’s work, commented that “the novelist and the poet, through their command of words, are mediators between the world of ideas and the world of reality.”

All data professionals, through their command of data, are also mediators between the world of ideas—whether recorded in the structured data of relational databases and spreadsheets, or the unstructured data of documents and social media content—and the world of reality, which is what all of that structured and unstructured data are discovering and attempting to describe.

Data is not Literal
As I have written about in previous posts, whether it’s an abstract description of real-world entities (i.e., “master data”) or an abstract description of real-world interactions (i.e., “transaction data”) among entities, data is an abstract description of reality.

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Source: smartdatacollective.com
By: Jim Harris