Cookies help us display personalized product recommendations and ensure you have great shopping experience.

By using this site, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Accept
SmartData CollectiveSmartData Collective
  • Analytics
    AnalyticsShow More
    data analytics and truck accident claims
    How Data Analytics Reduces Truck Accidents and Speeds Up Claims
    7 Min Read
    predictive analytics for interior designers
    Interior Designers Boost Profits with Predictive Analytics
    8 Min Read
    image fx (67)
    Improving LinkedIn Ad Strategies with Data Analytics
    9 Min Read
    big data and remote work
    Data Helps Speech-Language Pathologists Deliver Better Results
    6 Min Read
    data driven insights
    How Data-Driven Insights Are Addressing Gaps in Patient Communication and Equity
    8 Min Read
  • Big Data
  • BI
  • Exclusive
  • IT
  • Marketing
  • Software
Search
© 2008-25 SmartData Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Reading: Reflections on Gate 24
Share
Notification
Font ResizerAa
SmartData CollectiveSmartData Collective
Font ResizerAa
Search
  • About
  • Help
  • Privacy
Follow US
© 2008-23 SmartData Collective. All Rights Reserved.
SmartData Collective > Big Data > Data Warehousing > Reflections on Gate 24
Business IntelligenceData Warehousing

Reflections on Gate 24

DougLautzenheiser
DougLautzenheiser
7 Min Read
SHARE

It only took me a few minutes to walk the entire length of the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The gate numbers went to 24, but I counted only 17 doors out to the planes. Perhaps half a dozen airlines were represented there, with each company allocated 1 to 3 gates. The flight choices were limited — Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, and so forth.

With little else to do while waiting for my Delta flight, I picked up a copy of the…


It only took me a few minutes to walk the entire length of the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The gate numbers went to 24, but I counted only 17 doors out to the planes. Perhaps half a dozen airlines were represented there, with each company allocated 1 to 3 gates. The flight choices were limited — Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, and so forth.

With little else to do while waiting for my Delta flight, I picked up a copy of the SkyMiles magazine and read an excerpt from the 2008 Inforum debate between Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, and Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur: how blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values.”

More Read

Barriers to Strategy Execution
Dealing with Online Profiles
Kognitio Brings Big Data Experience to Business Analytics
Data, Data, Data: Communicating Successfully in the Deluge
With over 30 shopping-related APIs and 300+ mashups tagged…

I found one disagreement particularly interesting. Keen said his “biggest problem” with Wikipedia was that there is no “hierarchy of knowledge” — no centralized editorial staff judging the quality or amount of content for each entry.

There is no one at the heart of Wikipedia saying that the entry on Pamela Anderson should be shorter or . . . longer than that on Hannah Arendt. There’s no one in Wikipedia who determines that the entry on Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness,” which is really a footnote to an early-21st-century comedian, is longer or shorter than the entry on truth—the core concept in the Western canon, the core concept in the history of Western philosophy. So I may seem old-fashioned, but I believe in knowledge hierarchies. There has to be someone who makes a call on whether Pamela Anderson is more or less important than Marie Curie or Hannah Arendt. . . . Ultimately, for those people who go to Wikipedia who have no media literacy, who lack the skepticism, the education which we all have, I am fearful that in this open-source, free-knowledge universe we are going to be educating people who are not able to evaluate—not so much the accuracy of information, but the importance of information.

Wales thought Keen’s statement “strange” and guessed it came from an archaic viewpoint of space limitations associated with physical books. Wales responded:

[Wikipedia is] not like an encyclopedia where we say, look, we’ve got thirty volumes and so we have to cut, we have to limit somewhere.”

Is Keen still living in the Gutenberg world while Wales has found his way into the Google world? It seemed they could not communicate because of different worldviews.

With the physical limitations of the Gutenberg world, somebody had to make value decisions — you just couldn’t print everything because you ran out of room. In the new Google world, however, you basically have unlimited space to keep anything and everything, regardless of quality or value.

Will Rogers World Airport obviously has physical limits. There are only 17 gates, so you can’t have thousands of airplanes waiting outside. Inside the terminal, you have a few food options; there is just room enough for one fancy bar, Sonic (headquartered in OKC so it gets a special spot), Schlotzsky’s, and TJ Cinnamons. At each vendor, you see limits — Schlotzsky’s is only going to make certain types of sandwiches at the airport.

Of course, Keen is a smart guy. He knows that earlier physical limitations on printed material do not apply to data stored out in the virtual “cloud.” Keen is probably not bothered by relative lengths per se. Instead, he aspires to a high standard of somehow organizing knowledge according to its value.

But the challenge there is that some human being would make value judgments for the rest of society.

I ate at Schlotzsky’s and their original sandwich was fine. Somebody decided that this airport site could not stock the ingredients to make the Angus Pastrami Rueben, so I was out of luck. But no problem, I can pick up a Rueben back in Cincinnati.

But consider the issue of our stored knowledge — what committee would have omniscient abilities to judge what we need to know and remember? I would be concerned about giving somebody the power to say, “I decree that information about Pamela Sue Anderson will not become part of human knowledge — strike her from the record! Next on the list… some guy named Hasselhoff.”

Archaeologists base some important understandings of past civilization on what they found while digging through the “middens” — the garbage piles. They learn a great deal about human activities and behavior by analyzing what people discarded — things which at the time did not seem important enough to keep. Perhaps even if we decide to discard knowledge, we still need to throw it somewhere for safe-keeping.

In business intelligence, we often make value judgments on what to store for later decision making. In this new Google world, physical storage limits are going away. Our ability to handle large amounts of data is improving. We should consider saving everything (after all, one person’s trash…).

 

BI-Software.Blogspot.com

TAGGED:bibusiness intelligencedata warehousinginformation
Share This Article
Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn
Share

Follow us on Facebook

Latest News

AI supply chain
AI Tools Are Strengthening Global Supply Chains
Artificial Intelligence Exclusive
data analytics and truck accident claims
How Data Analytics Reduces Truck Accidents and Speeds Up Claims
Analytics Big Data Exclusive
predictive analytics for interior designers
Interior Designers Boost Profits with Predictive Analytics
Analytics Exclusive Predictive Analytics
big data and cybercrime
Stopping Lateral Movement in a Data-Heavy, Edge-First World
Big Data Exclusive

Stay Connected

1.2kFollowersLike
33.7kFollowersFollow
222FollowersPin

You Might also Like

Persuasion in simple terms

3 Min Read

Innovation and Analytics

6 Min Read

Looking at the increasing role of social media within business intelligence

6 Min Read

Predictive Analytics: 8 Things to Keep in Mind (Part 4)

6 Min Read

SmartData Collective is one of the largest & trusted community covering technical content about Big Data, BI, Cloud, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, IoT & more.

ai in ecommerce
Artificial Intelligence for eCommerce: A Closer Look
Artificial Intelligence
ai is improving the safety of cars
From Bolts to Bots: How AI Is Fortifying the Automotive Industry
Artificial Intelligence

Quick Link

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
Follow US
© 2008-25 SmartData Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Go to mobile version
Welcome Back!

Sign in to your account

Username or Email Address
Password

Lost your password?