Whose job is it to lead data standards? I believe data standards are in the interests of the whole community to which they apply. Leadership must come from within the community. However, it's unlikely leaders will emerge spontaneously. If there's no route for leadership to come forward, then data standards will remain “someone else's problem”.
There's a debate in Europe about whether data standards should be led by the European Commission or left to the market. This is like asking whether the federal government should lead standards or leave the job to the relevant interested organizations. And it kind of misses the point.
Suggesting a governmental agency should lead standards doesn't have to mean advocating government control or design of standards. It's just that, in the absence of obvious leadership routes within the market, people look to whatever overarching bodies exist – and these are going to be government departments.
So, Europe has been working to build a single market for decades now, and most of the labor is around harmonizing regulatory practices and tearing down barriers. The business of creating data standards to support a single digital market could fall into the competency of the European Commission.
But supranational bodies exist to do things nations can't. Data standards are not fundamentally national products and their ties to national control are often loose – they're around compliance and legal requirements rather than fundamental entity definitions. “The market” can create data standards without the help of European institutions.
The key here is leadership. “The market” can't play a leadership role – it must form some kind of representative group to lead on its behalf. Such a group may even go on to outsource technical work to a governmental agency of some kind or an established standards body. I'd say this: It's good for European institutions to encourage the creation of data standards. Business sectors must respond by forming, or strengthening their existing, representative bodies. These bodies must lead; the sector must support them; and the supranational institutions serve them.
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