Core Versus Crust

The art of a great painting is not in any one idea, nor in a multitude of separate tricks for placing all those pigment spots, but in the great network of relationships among its parts.

Similarly, the collection of data and code that comprise a digital resource are by themselves as valueless as aimless, scattered daubs of paint. What counts is what we make of them, in operational and functional phases of processes in systems.

The value of a FAIR resource lies not in some small, precious core, but in its vast, constructed crust.

A fierce belief in conceptual cores – in spirits, souls, or essences – may insinuate a helplessness to improve. To seek virtue in such cores may be as wrongly aimed a search as seeking art in canvas cloths by scraping off the painter’s work.