It was the rumor that Steve Hoberman (Technics Publications) planned to reissue Data and Reality by William Kent that led me to use this space to review books that had influenced my thinking about data and data quality. My plan had been to do the review of Data and Reality as soon as it came out. I completely missed the boat - it has been out for some six months.

I first read Data and Reality as we struggled at Bell Labs to develop a definition of data that would prove useful for data quality. While I knew philosophers had debated the merits of various approaches for thousands of years, I still thought “how hard can this be?” About twenty minutes with Kent’s book convinced me. This is really tough.

Data and Reality simply asks questions. Really simple, basic, timeless and fundamental questions. The first one is “What is ‘one thing’?” He then goes on, using example after example, to show how difficult it is to answer the question. “We are dealing with the natural ambiguity of words, which we as human beings resolve in a largely automatic and unconscious way, because we understand the context in which the words are being used.” Pair with this quote from Metaxides, atop Chapter 1, “Entities are a state of mind. No two people agree on what the real world view is.”

The questions grow increasingly difficult. Serious students of data should spend some time with Kent’s book.

By the way, hats off to Steve for re-issuing Data and Reality. I hope it gives added life to a timeless classic.