Absolutely! All too often we're guilty of saying "open the data because that's what I believe you should do", not "open the data because this is how it will make your life easier" or "open the data because this is how it will help you do your job", etc. It's come from a technologist-centric pull, but it won't succeed until it becomes a bureaucrat-originated push.

Could you post a link to your thesis? It sounds interesting. Thanks!

Hi, zuzulo. A versioning system would definitely be part of the solution, but there's more than git behind a successful open source project. In my post, I tried to sketch some of the tools that the data world is missing. Even if everyone just slapped the data into git, that implies it's stored in a format that makes it look like source code and so is amenable to diff and patch. What if we add a new column to the database? That affects every row, but should it be stored as a completely new version of the data? There are lots of interesting questions.

Thanks! In a testament to the power of caffeine and good friends, that chapter came together in the space of about four nights. I'd work regular business hours doing editing, then at 9 or 10pm I'd write the XML chapter. I got great feedback and clarifications from Matt Sergeant, Dan Brian, Michel Rodriguez, Adam Turoff, Robin Berjon, and other such Perl XML luminaries.

As you would have guessed if you heard me speak in 2000, I'm not the biggest XML user. I've mellowed since then, but I still don't do a lot of XML hacking. (One of the spare-time hacking things I've while here at O'Reilly, though, is to get our internal database of "what books are at what stage" into XML for easy grepping and reuse).

Of all my work in the 2nd edition of the Cookbook, the XML chapter is the one I'm proudest of. I'm really glad you like it. Thanks!

--Nat