Today I wrote a post on distributed revision/version control for data: http://blog.okfn.org/2010/07/12/we-need-distributed-revisionversion-control-for-data/
I'd be very interested to hear any comments people have, or any useful pointers to existing technology. Regards, Rufus <excerpt> In the open data community, we need tools for doing distributed revision/version control for data like the one’s that already exist for code. (Don’t know what I mean by revision control or distributed revision control? Read this) Distributed revision control systems for code, like mercurial and git, have had a massive impact on software development, and especially so in the F/OSS community — the distributed methodology works particularly well with open material. The same would be true for data. Revision control, and specifically distributed revision control, would support (cf this and this earlier post): * Incremental development: “patches”, changelogs etc * Provenance tracking: showing who did what, when is built in to a revisioning system * Broader participation: you don’t have to worry (as much) about who you let in because changes can be reverted. It’s also easier to get involved because you can have your own independent copy to play around with (Distributed). * Easier collaboration: updates don’t mean making a full copy (and applying updates is automatic), you can see who is making changes, when etc etc * Peer-2-peer model: different contributors can work simultaneously and independently (Distributed). Extra “features” can added independently of mainline development with re-integration later (Distributed). Because this is all a bit abstract it is worth giving a concrete example of why “distributed” revision control could be so useful. ... </excerpt> _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
