CDO Magazine interview with CEO Philip Dutton

Solidatus Co-CEO Philip Dutton recently caught up with Baz Khuti, President US Modak, about the difference between data and metadata, data lineage, and its role in the cloud space.

First up in the discussion was the somewhat grey area of the difference between data and metadata. A fan of analogies, Philip drew the perfect comparison:

“The Library of congress has 164 million items. How do you find the information you’re looking for? You do that by going to the index which points you to the right area. That is the metadata – describing where it is. And what it is. It gives us more classification and categorisation to help us determine if this the information we are looking for. Metadata gives the ability to find and understand the data you are looking for. If we move from a library to the internet, we can see that in this instance the data is the internet. We have trillions of webpages. How do you find what you are looking for? You go to a search engine which has indexed the metadata. That really is the crux of what metadata is – it’s the description of the data we are looking for.”

Philip and Baz went on to chat about important key points regarding lineage and cloud space:

• The role data lineage plays in metadata – it is all about connectivity. Lineage is the hyperlink between documents, the connection between data sources
• The opportunities and challenges of moving to the cloud – it generates infinite possibilities, but it’s important to not replicate mistakes from the past
• Cloud gives us greenfield opportunities to build better by default and by design – but we must first understand our data before it is moved