The Information Professional

Today, many scientific fields can be described as data-intensive disciplines, which turn raw data into information and then knowledge. If this sounds familiar it’s because this represents the late and influential computer scientist Jim Gray’s vision of the fourth research paradigm. Gray divided up the evolution of science into four periods or paradigms. One thousand years ago, science was experimental in nature, a few hundred years ago it became theoretical, a few decades ago it moved to a computational discipline, and today it’s data driven. Researchers are reliant on e-science tools to enable collaboration, federation, analysis, and exploration to address this data deluge, equal to about 1.2 zettabytes each year. If 11 ounces of coffee equaled one gigabyte, a zettabyte would be the same volume as the Great Wall of China. (...) - by Adrian Giordani, MyScienceWork blog, 27 november 2012

By Karen Coyle:

"With the visible speed-up of all forms of information resources, even those that are ostensibly in traditional offline formats, doubts are growing about the ability of libraries to afford the costs of hand-hewn bibliographic control today and in the future.

Linking and federating

What if you extrapolate from developments within library systems, such as federated searching, enhanced catalogs, and OpenURL, to the idea of libraries on the web?"

[...]

"The Semantic Web will develop in two ways: First, by linking information that exists within documents, and second, by making the data itself accessible on the web. The ability to mark up information in documents could allow smarter access to that information than we get with keyword searching. For example, markup could identify the author of a document so that an author search could be done, something search engines do not provide today."