A sign of maturity for most technologies and professions is the appearance of standards. Standards are used to enable, to promote, to measure, and perhaps to govern the use of that technology or the practice of that profession across a wide spectrum of communities. Standardization increases independent applications and comparative evaluations of the tools and practices of a profession.

Standards often apply to processes and codes of conduct, but standards also apply to digital content, including: (a) interoperable data exchange (such as GIS, CDF, or XML-based data standards); (b) data formats (such as ASCII or IEEE 754); (c) image formats (such as GIF or JPEG); (d) metadata coding standards (such as ICD-10 for the medical profession, or the Dublin Core for cultural, research, and information artifacts); and (e) standards for the sharing of models (such as PMML, the predictive model markup language, for data mining models).

Standards are ubiquitous.  This abundance causes some folks to quip: “The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them.”  So, it should not be surprising to note that standards are now beginning to appear also in the worlds of big data and data science, providing evidence of the growing maturity of those professions…

(continue reading here … https://www.mapr.com/blog/raising-standard-big-data-analytics-profession)

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