Stand still and watch the patterns, which by pure chance have been generated: Stains on the wall, or the ashes in a fireplace or the clouds in the sky, or the gravel on the beach, or other things. If you look at them carefully you might discover miraculous inventions. (Leonardo da Vinci)

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Where is it? Standardized Data Models for persons customers and organizations

Juli 14th, 2009 Innovation|

I just ask myself why there are no initiatives to develop standardized data models for customer and organizational data - maybe I didn’t find it yet. But, wouldn’t it be such an improvement to not just talk about databases or data stores but about MDM stores. Don’t get me wrong, I do not think about building another CRM system with another “best data model“. I think about finding something in between providing applications and infrastructural engines. An commercial computing infrastructure which implicitly contains all the basic data models such as “Customer”, “Organization“, “Product” and so on. This would lead to a boost in interoperability of systems, data quality, …

What do you think. Right now its just a thought while listening to a talk of Adrian Cole of jcloud….

Tags: Adrian Cole, customer, Data, Database, Infrastructure, Interoperability, jcloud, Models, Organization, Product

2 Comments on “Where is it? Standardized Data Models for persons customers and organizations”

1 QueereeNipfek said at 12:39 on August 19th, 2009:
yeh right.. great post, Thank You
2 Olivier Mathurin said at 3:07 on August 31st, 2009:
This is not totally right, in fact the problem is more that there are far TOO MANY of such initiatives

Without talking about the software vendore, each industry/consortium try to push their own standards (Retailers like GS1, e-business like XCBL, finanial information like XBRL). Some industry transversal communities also tries to establish such a standard data model, like MDM Alliance Group (http://www.mdmalliancegroup.com/datamodels/) - Open Source and UML - and so also tries the Semantic Web Technologies community by providing free ontologies (you can find hundred of them only describing a “person”). But I really think the truth is out there…

Because of historical reasons, each “silo” has developed/invested/used different data model to serve their own interests. And as long as there is no “need” for them to change it, why would they? The only reason for them is a wider entity that “force” them to change, or if they really “see” a killer-advantage to adopt it: a good example is the adoption of GS1 standards in the retail+manufacturer ecosystem, for electronic trading between manufacturer and supermarket.

So, to have a wide adoption of a standard data model of what is a “person” or an “organization”, etc. unless an international trans-industry and powerful community is setup and providing real advantages for adopters (UN initiative ?), not that much chance to see such utopic globalized standard data model… But personnally, I don’t see any hope from SWT…

And also, just try to modelize a person, taking in account their particularity regarding their country of origins and their language - name (60 ways to name a person in 240 countries), address (240 address formats worldwide, with 60 countries not having even a zip code like Ireland) etc. and you will see how hard it is to make it global