Saturday, June 12, 2010

National museum of data

Computers have certainly done a lot to make vast amounts of data available & there are no end of sites trying to make at least some of it accessible & comprehensible to a wider public.

But it is all a bit hit & miss, hard to find your way around, particularly if you are trying to find something specific rather than just marvel at what you happen to come across.

Then there is the continuing problem of trying to persuade those who gather data to lodge it somewhere in a form that it can be shared or reanalysed, looked at from a different point of view or in the light of new discoveries, by others

What we need is something like national data archives, a sort of cross between the collections of the great museums (especially the Natural History Museum), libraries & archives. We specifically need the skills of indexers, classifiers, taxonomists & archivists; search engines are not enough.


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