Look it up in the Index

Books have been the vault for knowledge since ancient times, and the web is inheriting that role. Books have an index in the back, and the web has search engines, both are ways to access information by content. Want to know about Bengal Tigers, search for “Bengal Tigers”. Whether an index entry or a search string, these are meaningful to humans, and act as keys for retrieving information. Data is content too, but the evolution of data for computers has gone down a different path. More like a filing system than a book, schemas, objects, or other kinds of models sort information in a particular way, accessed by column or table names, like the labels on file drawers and folders.

Like a wall of file cabinets, once you determine a schema for your data, you have to live with it for a long time. Different organizations or departments in an enterprise evolve their own filing systems or schemas. Electronic document stores allow more fluid schemes of tagging, and web-like searching of content, but structured data remains mostly filed by table and column according to a schema.

Indexing structured data by phrases similar to a book index or web search is a new idea. It turns out that there is nothing lost, and much gained relative to model-based data. You learn something by looking at how file cabinets are organized, but much more when you read over the index in the back of a book. With computers in the picture, queries and other computational tasks can be better than with schematic data because it is naturally indexed by content, and there’s more information to work with. We believe phrase-oriented data will be the way most structured data is represented in the future.