The Information Specialist's Scoop

"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.

This article was originally published in International Science Grid This Week as “Enabling knowledge creation in data-driven science”
http://www.isgtw.org/feature/enabling-knowledge-creation-data-driven-science

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"To answer this problem [of data deluge], some are creating infrastructures and software that are set to radically transform the way scientific publishing is done, which has been little changed for centuries.

While a number of scientific institutes, European Commission-funded projects, and research communities work on establishing common data policies and open-access infrastructures to make research data more searchable, shareable, and citable, the life sciences are looking at data analysis and publishing approaches that move the computer to the data rather than moving the data to the computers"