The Lifetime of Geodata

This is OpenData from the Ordnance Survey. It has been collected in the early 70s to create contour lines for topographic maps. The maps were later scanned, digitized and stored as DXF contour lines and as ASCII grid files. This image has been created from the ASCII files using GDAL.
The Lifetime of Software
So how do these two things go together? The lifetime of (certain) software becoming shorter and shorter and that of data extends practically endlessly? Right now it seems to not go together at all. One of the primary reasons is that software developers tend to perceive data as a nuisance. Something that gets in the way of great software design. It has to be taken into consideration but it is not fun. It slows innovation and takes up resources. Go away.
Software developers are bad Data designer
What is the source of this problem? It should be blatantly obvious by now. Typically the people implementing software are software developers. Did you ever meet a data developer? No? Me neither. And if you did, are you sure it really was a data developer? I bet it probably only was a failed software developer. Or someone infected with an architecture design, be it Client/Server, SOA, Web 2.0, RESTful, API or whatever. What do they have in common? They think in terms of the software. The only recent exception may be resource orientation or the ROA (Resource Oriented Architecture). But do you read anything much about this anywhere?
Metadata Anybody?

A piece of metadata. Useless but compliant.
This is also the reason why we have no metadata. Anybody really in love with their data would maintain it's lineage. It would be beautiful metadata. Not pointy brackets we have to fill with predefined content like INSPIRE wants us to do. We would document where the data came from, what happened to it, who worked on it, what is the accuracy and so on. But nobody cares about this. Because you need a pretty technical background to understand how to do it. And the people with technical background usually come from a software perspective. It is a deadlock situation. Praise Open Data if only to bring out this problem into bright sunlight for everybody to see.
How to Proceed?
We developed a few ideas during my recent stint at the Ordnance Survey. Thanks agin to everybody who I worked with there for a very educative and insightful time! What we did is take a piece of geospatial data and track it down throughout the organization. Ignore the software. Just follow the data. And then look at how this path can be improved. From the perspective of the data. Amazingly it can be improved by simply removing half the software. And by maintaining a record of what has been done to the data as it travels through the organization. And by talking to the people who did the little dirty tricks to the data to make it work with "their" software. Did you hear that? The things that were done to the data to make it work with the software. This is simply wrong. It should be the other way round. You should never, ever change your data according to the specs of a software. Data must come first, because:
Your software will go away. Your data is going to stay.
Have fun,
Arnulf