Afterword
Throughout this book, I have put forth concepts, metrics, and methodologies that will help you improve how you implement a data catalog. I also endeavored to impress upon you the idea that how you organize your data determines how you can search for it.
In Chapter 8, I discussed the future of the data catalog and how it is likely to turn into a company search engine because it draws parallels with the evolution of the web search engine. The technology will evolve, but so will our behaviors, and that’s what I want to talk about here. It’s the philosophical dimension of searching for data.
The question is, what will the company search engine do to us and the places we work?
In Ambient Findability,1 Peter Morville described the beginning of a new era where powerful search engines make it possible for everyone to find everything on the web from anywhere in the world. If the data is online, it can be found and used. That’s ambient findability. He concluded the book with the following:
The web has changed how we live, when we work, where we go, and what we believe. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. We can glimpse what lies ahead in the eyes of a child through the lens of a Treo. A brilliant intertwingling of atoms, bits, push, pull, social, semantic, mind, and body, where what we find changes who we become. As Jorge Luis Borges promised us, in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the book and the labyrinth are one and the same. Safe travels.
I want you to remember that this was written ...
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