EMC is building stronger relationships with universities and technology companies in the Cambridge, MA area. I've been making monthly visits to Harvard University to interact with both their CS department and their Initiative for Innovative Computing department.
For several years I've been monitoring Harvard's research on Provenance-Aware Storage Systems (PASS). The PASS team has spent several years outlining the importance of maintaining provenance and they have collaborated with others to build several systems that implement provenance.
Their PASS research overlaps with internal research I've been doing on data lineage using object-based storage systems. One of the thornier issues to solve with data lineage or provenance is the unity of content and lineage. Object-based storage systems are characterized by their ability to permanently bind content and metadata together using a unique identifier. It stands to reason that object-based systems would be of interest to the PASS team.
Several months ago I presented this approach to a room full of technologists at Harvard. My presentation was a XAM presentation in the context of digital curation (the very same lecture I had given live as part of the EMC Innovation Lecture series). I reasoned with the audience that although XAM is a great technology for digital curation, it is also a great technology for researching provenance.
What was the end result? There were many heads nodding in agreement about the potential for XAM implementations of data lineage, as well as a good amount of questioning and possible requests for enhancements to XAM that might need to be looked at as well.
As the fall semester winds down we'll be continuing the conversations in 2010 and looking for ways to progress this type of research.
Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Intrapreneur
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