While driving passing Tower Records it occurred to me that businesses have lifespans. Metaphorically speaking, businesses are born, nurtured, mature and die.
Data seems to follow this same path of birth, being nurtured, maturing and (sometimes) dying, depending on how intimately tied the data is to the entity which is sustained by the data.
Most of the dot-com ventures that crashed in the late 1990′s collected data of some type. As an example, it seems to me that the forecasting sales data of pets.com is virtually useless at this point, while other parts (such as pets.com’s customer list) may still be relevant to petsmart.com.
Some data may never die: census data seems to always be valued in some form. Census data from earlier historical periods (such as the Roman Empire) is valued by historians.
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