One of the significant issues facing people trying to make sense of data is getting the data in a format that can be analysed – particularly if you’re trying to use data from disparate sources. This following article notes an open source attempt to overcome this problem. See Wired News: Analyze This: Combining Data

In hopes of broadening the potential of this kind of software, several companies plan to announce an agreement Monday on a technological standard that will let multiple computing engines for sorting unstructured data work together.

The programming codes that govern the framework, spearheaded by International Business Machines in conjunction with academic researchers and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will be open source and freely available.

Back when I was doing data mining related work this was a huge issue, so I’ll be interested in seeing what they come up with.