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Big Data or Open Data and Cloud Data

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PCQ Bureau
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face="Verdana, sans-serif"> style="font-style: normal;">Andy

Mulholland, CTO,
color="#0000ff"> face="Verdana, sans-serif"> style="font-style: normal;">Capgemini face="Verdana, sans-serif"> style="font-weight: normal;">

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face="Times New Roman, serif">As

long as we define it by traditional internal structured data it's

really a game of more manipulation and more power to analyze what we

have better, and so more products and services are continually made

available for us to do this. However, the real challenge, indeed the

real value, is that most businesses want to figure out how to find

and use external unstructured data to make real breakthroughs in

seeing the 'real' world through using the data of others. The

questions are therefore: What are the external sources from which we

can get at least reasonably trusted data? How can we store the huge

amounts of data? How can we manage access to it all?

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face="Times New Roman, serif"> style="font-weight: normal;">September

wasn't a bad month for making progress on these issues as the href="http://www.opengovpartnership.org/">Open

Government Partnership held its first meeting in New York

supported by the United Nations with the following statement as to

its principles:
face="Times New Roman, serif"> style="font-weight: normal;">In

a world marked by so much turmoil, we need open government to build

trust and to revitalize the social compact between states and

citizens. Openness can bring governments and citizens together,

cultivate shared understandings, and help solve our practical

problems. It starts with sharing information.

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face="Times New Roman, serif"> style="font-weight: normal;">The

participating governments, and increasingly local government units as

well, are signing up to the ' href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data">open

data' movement, meaning that they are making at least a

reasonable amount of their trusted data available to be used by

business or in the development of new solutions. Open data, the act

of making your data sets available for others to use without

copyright or other hindrance, has allowed some interesting new

services to be introduced. href="http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html">Google

Transit

Feed is a particularly well known example tying a

metropolitan area transit authority's data to Google maps and

feeding a new generation of apps for mobility devices such as

href="http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/03/18/whens-the-next-bus-due-theres-an-app-for-that-too/">NextBus.

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face="Times New Roman, serif"> style="font-weight: normal;">At

the root of this is a very serious point about 'using', in the

full sense of the word, open data, meaning both being able to find

and use new real-time feeds, as well as make some of your own data

available in this manner to encourage others to make your company

more 'visible' in the market. Open data requires an application

programming interface (API) to access the data and though this can be

defined and published to suit the open data set when it is made

available, it's a really good policy to make sure that when

developing 'services' to make sure that the data set is separated

around its own API and that the service then consumes the data via

the API. Think of it as a valuable move towards all app developments,

and for more information on this in the government programs take a

look at the work of Code for

America
.

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face="Times New Roman, serif"> style="font-weight: normal;">The

other interesting event was the release by the Storage Networking

Industry Association, SNIA, of the Cloud Data Management Interface,

or CDMI, the standard for providing virtualized storage in the form

of Data as a Service, or DaaS. In their own words from the standards

pages of their website:
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CDMI defines the

functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve,

update and delete data elements from the Cloud. As part of this

interface the client will be able to discover the capabilities of the

cloud storage offering and use this interface to manage containers

and the data that is placed in them. In addition, metadata can be set

on containers and their contained data elements through this

interface. This interface is also used by administrative and

management applications to manage containers, accounts, security

access and monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is

accessible by other protocols. The capabilities of the underlying

storage and data services are exposed so that clients can understand

the offering.
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The whole point of

CDMI is to provide a 'simple', yet secure and reliable, interface

that will encourage the use of virtualized storage and enable the

access to data held in this manner, which of course is the link back

to open data! CDMI works for most types of data but is optimized for

REST, Restful State Transfer, as one might expect in building the new

generation of apps based on the Web Architecture with HTML5. CDMI

doesn't just simplify accessibility and use, it also manages a

cohesive set of security measures — indeed these are comprehensive

enough that on their own they would justify adopting CDMI.
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So, two big moves

that make apps for mobility clients, defined as new generation

capabilities that can be combined from data sources onto a Web model

and run from clouds, easier to deploy. BUT, as is generally the case

with this new environment, new development methods and standards are

all important!



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