Because there is only one thing that all technologists can agree on: that we have no conception of the breadth of technologies and tools coming at us in the not-too-distant future. The only thing we can say, then, is that there will always be a requirement to interpret existing data through a new technology. How, then, does it make any sense to start anywhere else but the data? A rose by any other name -- and persisted in a relational database or a graph, in a JSON string or a COBOL copybook -- would still smell as sweet.