The data sharing imperative - an irresistable force

If you deal with data in any way (and you do), get ready for the world to start sharing data at a faster rate, in much more detail, and organized where many more people can use it for a much wider set of purposes. You can help it happen, watch it happen, or later wonder "what happened?"

Standardized data vocabularies will make this all possible. I examine this topic in detail in my book "Silver Bullets - how interoperable data will revolutionize information sharing and transparency". The "plumbing" is all coming into focus, with a wide array of data formats having been developed over that last several years, and many more in the works.

Why is this an imperative? Data collection is too expensive a task for everyone to take on, and the decreasing cost of publishing and consuming data is less than doing without. Let's take a traffic example - if a manufacturer has 2 plants on each side of Chicago, and needs to route critical parts shipments back and forth - there are a variety of things that can impact the flow of materials and production.
a: actual location - easy to pinpoint and map today
b. Traffic: Many cities are starting to make traffic cameras available, and mapping packages like Microsoft Bing have a real time capability to show major thoroughfare bottlenecks.
c. Weather: NOAA and other weather providers are identifying severe weather ahead of time, and making those alerts easily consumable.
d. Events: Where did that neighborhood parade come from?

These are just some of the simple sharing items that can occur - when you combine business partner interactions, government to private sector notifications, movement of data between government layers (federal, state, local), and all the other types of shareable data, there is much to choose from.

Standardized collection of all these data types and the distribution to a wide array of mobile devices will change the fabric of our lives in 20 years. Data will be available where needed (increasingly from automated sensors in a structured form) to make better decisions. It will impact us in every aspect of our lives - especially as video becomes smarter and provides data as well as images.

Will there be negative backlash - of course? Will there be breakdowns and shortfalls? Undoubtedly. Privacy violations? Many. Will the inexorable push forward continue? Absolutely - just like the glaciers in the Ice Age.