It was not so much born in flame and war but wrapped in a shroud of ambiguity and mystery. It did not so much explode onto the technological scene in a vibrant and eruptive entrance that rocked us all back on our heels. Instead it seeped pervasively almost subliminally, unannounced, until we realised one day that it was all people were talking about.

I cannot remember in my 30 odd years in the technology field an emerging technology that raised so much slow burn, a creeping interest that led eventually to a vibrant discourse. An ascending interest despite it being seemingly beyond the levels of our technical and engineering comprehension. The technology is called, if that is what it is, the Unified Namespace. But the Unified Namespace is as Winston Churchill once remarked against another confounded problem, "A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma".

This book is dedicated to those who, like me, have struggled to comprehend and come to some sort of terms with this deeply ambiguous ... What is it, a technology, an architecture, a methodology or a strategy, or none of these things? Hopefully by the end of this book we will have come to a suitable conclusion in which to classify and come to terms with this obscure entity coined, the Unified Namespace.

This book contemplates both the benefits and the drawbacks of the illusive industrial framework called the Unified Namespace (UNS). Initially this conceptual idea of a shared centalised 'single source of truth' that spans the Operational Technology (OT) and Informational Technology (IT) domains seemed benign and a common sense approach. Intriguingly, the more you look under the hood the more confounded you become; on one hand what optimistically appears to be a cheap and easy opportunity to share data across the organisation (digitalization) is pleasing but if you are risk averse and take a more worldy wise perspective there are potentially vast money pits appearing on the horizon. This due to the UNS's towering ambition drives it relentlessly, and often uncontrollably into the realm of huge multi-year and multi-millions dollar projects in the governance and regulatory heavy world of DataOps. Was this where you initially planned to end up?

This book will provide you with a reliable roadmap for negotiating this perilous path.