Listening to the remembrances of Pete Seeger this week and
being reminded again of how he used music to build communities and reach across ages gave me an idea.
What if we used music to date our geospatial data and standards? We could link to ITunes songs and it
would universally convey not only the time period of the data set but also would relate the data or
standards to other things going on at the time.
For example, what if I told you the Cadastral Data Content Standards were published when Pearl Jam’s Better Man and Daughter, Madonna’s
Secret, and Melissa Etheridge’s Come to My Window were getting a lot
airplay. Does that convey a sense
of what was going on, what you were working on at the same time, and how much
time has passed?
Or what if you thought about when we first explored
statewide parcel data sets in the modern GIS era Jon Bon Jovi’s Miracle, Phil
Collins’ Do You Remember and Another Day in Paradise, and Vanilla Ice with Ice
Ice Baby were on everyone’s walkman or car radio probably more like it.
Maybe Baha Men and Who Let the Dogs Out would be a good tune
for the 2000 Census, one of those benchmark data sets. What if Who Let the Dogs Out played on
your computer when you opened a 2000 Census data set? Would that be sufficient warning about the data vintage?
We should give some thought to adding an ITune link that
would open with the data set to our metadata. It might make it easier to date it, easier to relate its
vintage to other data sets, and maybe even make the metadata memorable. You could scroll through a play list instead of clicking the metadata links. It would definitely make geospatial
metadata and dating our standards more interesting.
Next time you publish a data set think about what your are listening to, what's your data set's tune?
