Yes, to some extent. Several things make the invention of new data formats less common.
1) For file formats: RDBMS and other standard-ish databases replace many ad-hoc data formats. Image, video, audio all have standard formats now. There is much less need to keep inventing data formats for stored data now. You still need a schema of the data, but it's not a format schema, it's a database schema. 2) bandwidth and energy/power are broadly available - data formats intended to save bandwidth by packing the bits, or to save power by transmitting fewer bits, these are unnecessary now except in a few corners of computerdom. Basically any new application can layer its data needs atop JSON, and if they find that slow there is EXI for JSON so it can be made very dense, and a schema language for JSON exists as well. 3) floating point and decimal standards IEEE754, eliminate the need for the legacy of using fixed point integers or obscure decimal encodings for numbers. 4) Unicode has eliminated most charset-related issues. So most data format issues are about coping with the legacy of successful existing data formats. Some of these are standardized (EDIFACT, Link16, etc.), but many are per-business local file formats. There remains the issue of what data means, but the format issues are much less of an issue. That all said, existing data formats are a *huge* problem still. There's thousands of "well known" such formats, and thousands more custom per-business kinds of formats. On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 8:40 AM Roger L Costello <coste...@mitre.org> wrote: > On the U.S. government side: > > An enormous amount of brainpower, energy, and time went into creating the > United States Message Text (USMTF) data format. > > An enormous amount of brainpower, energy, and time went into creating the > Link-16 data format. > > There are dozens of other government data formats that involved the > expenditure of an enormous amount of brainpower, energy, and time. > > On the commercial side: > > An enormous amount of brainpower, energy, and time went into creating each > of the image data formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, etc.). > > An enormous amount of brainpower, energy, and time went into creating the > document data formats (HTML, XML, CSS, PDF, Word, etc.). > > There are dozens of other commercial data formats that involved the > expenditure of an enormous amount of brainpower, energy, and time. > > I see many little data formats - JSON, YAML, Markdown, Protocol Buffers, > etc. - being created in recent years, but no huge data formats. > > Are the days of creating large, complex data formats over? > > /Roger > >
