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March 06, 2006
DoD Discovery Metadata System (DDMS)
Like all large organizations, the Department of Defense (DoD) has serious data integration problems. The DDMS is a standard for mapping local data definitions to DoD-wide metadata. Here's a key chart from page 15 of DDMS standard:
Source: http://www.afei.org/news/ddms.pdf, page 15.
The idea is that knowledge workers would be able to submit queries (upper right hand of diagram) expressed in terms of the metadata and those queries would be translated into properly formatted queries expressed in local database terms. An ambitious and important goal!
Apparently, however, the project has fallen on budgetary hard times. Just like every other organization, it's hard to get management (in this case Congress) to fund infrastructure. There are no immediate, key benefits from this system. Sure seems like a good idea, however, and important for the future.
Posted by DavidK at March 6, 2006 12:12 PM | Permalink