Any hopes of an uncontested cloud-based data standard now appear shaky, thanks to the announcement of the Cloud Information Model (CIM) project. The CIM looks set to compete with the Open Data Initiative (ODI), which launched in September 2018. Both want to solve the problem of cloud-level data interoperability, but they are now risking a standards battle which could prove challenging for data-intensive environments like AI-driven 5G or the Internet of Things. As both the ODI and the CIM recruit followers, the desired objective of pooling and standardizing as much data as possible becomes ever more distant. It is not clear why the two organizations could not simply merge now and pool their resources, nor is it clear why the…