Comments
Invited Review Comment #217 Jane Wyngaard @ 2025-08-28 22:41
The whole paper needs an edit by someone who's 1st language English. There are many grammatical errors and many paragraphs of text saying the same thing as elsewhere in buzz word filled repetitive sentences.
Chapters 1-4 are particularly bad.
Ch1:
States that the paper concludes that RDM while brownfield could and should use an industrial data mesh concept but fails to clearly articulate what that is.
Ch2:
There's a good section talking through the past with data warehouses and lakes and ecosystems in real terms, but then the authors return to buzz words and fail to make clear the distinction between for instance data ecosystems and data meshes.
There's an interesting idea being explored but the context and concept are not described clearly. How exactly a data mesh approach would differ from others and even how it would practically bring value is not made clear. All the discussed value and outcomes sound great but it's not at all clear how it would be possible to achieve. While it's appropriate for this section to not yet be discussing very low details (which finally come in Ch5) the chapter lacks a structure and wording that would indicate to the reader that these details are coming, it fails to even hint at the how at even a extremely high level which would give the reader a preview of where the paper is going and help a reader start thinking about this idea and these terms in the right frame of reference.
Ch4 is supposed to be methodology but doesn't describe a methodology and simply recaps again the previous sections of the paper
Ch5: Finally expands on the definition and how of the idea of a data mesh, putting it in terms that make the concept tractable
They emphasise the scope of gain is primarily to increase findability and allow the domain/source/host/expert closest to the data to define the schema, tooling, metadata, and even analysis and product generation rather than alternatives such as trying to enforce a global universal standard. The authors go into a helpful level of detail on how this would lead to all the gains originally promised in the introduction.
At various points in the paper reference is made to how the data mesh concept is not new and has been explored elsewhere but these other explorations are never described - that should be added to give this paper more depth and value if it is to become the current reference for data mesh application to research and specifically engineering research data management.
I would like to see this revised and published, it holds interesting ideas with potential value but needs to be restructured for that value to be realised.