In Sedona last week we were discussing QC and sampling mostly. However, a short sidebar happened surrounding the ability to get data from one system to another. As I mentioned in my previous post this is becoming more and more important to our clients, which means we need to be moving toward an accepted standard, whatever that may be. We not only need to transfer data between vendors, but also across upgrades.

This week at Discovery Mining we’ve heard from more than one client about the problems with data portability within internal software applications. Specifically upgrading from Concordance 7 to 8 (a.k.a. 2007). I’m not a Concordance expert, nor do I pretend to be, but this example screams for a universal standard. The specific issue our clients were experiencing was the inability to view some new databases that were created in the new version with the old version 7. Because databases converted to version 8 cannot be viewed by 7.3 backward, the client is left with a big headache, to say the least. The upgrade process is time consuming and expensive. I’m sure there’s a workaround, but for most cases workarounds are not adequate.

Having a data portability plan and standard will help with a situation like the one described above. I’m looking forward to continuing the efforts on this front, and trying to stay technology agnostic, but as Google just opened up their platform maybe litigation support can follow the leader. Google has opened up the entire platform and lets you mashup almost every service using a series of open web api’s. Yes, you need to know Python, but hey, it’s a start. In 30 minutes I was able to build a silly little test app here. My app doesn’t do much but as you can see it’s integrated into the login/users data of Google. Amazon is the leader in this area with their AWS, but this is not about web services.

As the larger data intensive companies know, being open to standards ultimately helps everyone. I think we should all consider the efforts of the EDRM XML group and petition The Sedona Conference to weigh in and influence the bench, thereby, helping and influencing the industry.