New Year's Resolutions 2: there is no metadata!
I just came across an amazingly brilliant post by Glenn McDonald at ITA software (it's been written a while ago, last summer, but just read it entirely now). Do me a favor and read it entirely here: Never Mind the...
The Semantic Web’s Controlled Chaos
February 11, 2008 By Uche Ogbuji
This URL openness leads to a free-for-all where links are used in a million places with a million nuances, and no clear order or control. There is no schema, no neat wrapping application. Your main hope of figuring out what's wrong is to view source. This sounds like chaos to an enterprise data architect, but these are the very characteristics that make it work. And despite appearances, there is indeed order. And it comes not from central planning, but from the marketplace.
Google provides the order.
Obviously, it's more than just Google Inc., The point is that open URLs and uncontrolled linking means that anyone can contribute to the chaos, but it also means that anyone can work on innovations for providing some means of management and control, which they can then sell to users.
Clearly no enterprise is interested in a public marketplace for its internal, proprietary data, but this doesn't mean they have to be closed to some of the benefit. In the marketplace for applications and services to integrate into your enterprise, Web architecture shines the spotlight on features and innovation, rather than nit-picky application and version support. The same openness built on lightweight standards, and the same resulting view-source mentality means that systems integration doesn't mean losing integrity, but rather sharing benefits.
Enterprise architects have much to gain by using URLs for application IDs, and making it easy to share these URLs. These don't have to replace the internal IDs of traditional databases. They are just another little bit of information to be related through Web architecture. There is plenty of real-world experience available in the design of such systems, and plenty of real-world proof that open information ecosystems may be sloppy, but that they work, and that they endure.
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This URL openness leads to a free-for-all where links are used in a million places with a million nuances, and no clear order or control. There is no schema, no neat wrapping application. Your main hope of figuring out what's wrong is to view source. This sounds like chaos to an enterprise data architect, but these are the very characteristics that make it work. And despite appearances, there is indeed order. And it comes not from central planning, but from the marketplace. 
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