Since advocating for transparent and open data schemas and data repositories, I’ve run into other high tech professionals who have opined that such data requirements are only applicable to my core competency in the U.S. Aerospace & Defense vertical. Now, in the 26 November on-line edition of the journal Science, comes an opinion piece from a number of Chinese corrosion scientists under the title “Materials science: Share corrosion data” have advocated the development of open data infrastructures to make the age and life of existing metallurgic infrastructure easily accessible to technology in a non-proprietary format.
As the article states, “corrosion costs six cents for every dollar of gross domestic product in the United States. Globally, that amounts to more than US$4 trillion a year — equivalent to damages from 40 Hurricane Katrinas. Half of that cost is in corrosion prevention and control, the other half in damages and lost productivity.”
In the software technology industry, the recent issues regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has revealed strains in U.S.-Chinese relations on intellectual property and proprietary systems. So the danger is always that the source of the advocacy will be ignored, despite the clear economic argument in favor of what the editorial proposes.
But the concern is transnational in nature. As the piece points out, the U.S. Department of Energy has initiated its own program in alignment with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) to establish open repositories of data in support of the alternative energy industry. Given the aging U.S. infrastructure and the dangers from sudden failure from these engineering systems, it seems wise to track and share data for materials corrosion and lifespans. Think of the sudden bridge failures that have hit headlines over the last several years.
Since the cost of not doing so can be measured in lives as well as economic cost, such data normalization and rationalization in this area takes on the role of being an essential element of governance.
Life, Project Management, and Everything 