We could go on. The point is that no one ‘owns’ a data element, at least nothing that’s agreed upon globally, and that’s a problem. Because we are global creatures living as members of a global environment. No man (or country) is an island. Data travels around our world at the speed of thought through social media and interconnected systems. It’s perpetual-once a ‘thought’ is out there, it’s out there for good because somewhere it’s been captured by an IT ‘system’.
Data is accessible from virtually anywhere and we can learn something about anything with a few key strokes (although we have no way of knowing the veracity of what we find). So, stuff is out there in a plethora of forms, some of it is correct, some of it isn’t, and you need special tools to get much of it. How do we know what we know? Personally, I think this era will eventually be known as the Second Dark Ages because we don’t know what we know and have no way to capture (into perpetuity) our knowledge.