How Much Freedom Does Your Data Have?

I had the good luck to attend Carnegie Mellon University during the days when Raj Reddy’s Robotics Institute was testing the Terragator and the Mars Ambler. It was fascinating to watch the ‘gator wander around campus (always followed by a couple of PhD candidates, of course) and even more fun to make bets on how far up the hillside the Ambler would get before it flipped.
It was during my undergraduate ‘Introduction to Robotics’ class that I first learned about the concept of ‘degrees of freedom’ (DOF). DOF is defined as ‘any one of the number of independent ways in which the space configuration of a mechanical system may change.’ In short, how many different directions can an object move? For example, the human arm has 7 DOFs, where the shoulder gives pitch, yaw and roll (that’s 3), an elbow allows for pitch (1 more), and a wrist allows for pitch, yaw and roll (3 more). The leg/foot together have a whopping 30. Today some robots have up to 20 DOF and a few are even teaching themselves about their own DOF limits.
I think degrees of freedom can be applied to enterprise data as well. I would propose these 7 degrees as my ‘EDDOF’ (Enterprise Data Degrees of Freedom) thesis...Speed – How fast can you get to the data? i.e. If you need if today, regardless of where it is, can you get it ‘on demand’?Agility – How adaptable are data sources to the various people who use it? i.e. Can anyone add a new source or a new view on an old source ?Depth – Is the data just the most recent, or does it also include past/historic/archive data too?Width – What types of data can be accommodated? Old stuff like VSAM? Mainstream stuff like SQL, REST, or SOAP? Newish stuff like JSON or RDF?Control – Is the data subject to all same security protections as the source(s)?Currency – How ‘in synch’ is the data with the source(s)? i.e. Is the data produced from the source(s) with every request?Expression – Is the data easily shared with others and coherent to them in its presented format?Using these criteria, I think we can produce a meaningful DOF measurement for some of the more popular information-manipulation technologies:


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