Why should I use international standards?
The post below is a guest post from Will Poynter, lead engineer at CLOSER Discovery, based in the UK. Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. – Douglas Adams And now data is big too. Lots of you will have heard, or read, that in the past two years we have created more data than all previous years combined. And there appears to be no indication or reason to think that this rate of growth is going to slow down anytime soon. In a previous post, I shared my thoughts on the big data issue, and why, in order to correctly utilize the new quantity of data, we need new tools and infrastructure. But currently, there is a huge impediment in the way of achieving these new tools and infrastructure. Most data is not held using international standards. Let me jump back a little. I am an alumnus of the University of Manchester, where an impressive number of buildings, roads and parks are named after Joseph Whitworth. Whitworth was a pivotal figure, during the 19th century, for his creation of a set of standards covering screws, nuts, bolts and tools. This may […]