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Brown Dog: a Search Engine For the Other 99 Percent (of Data)

Posted by Soulskill on from the because-it-fetches-data dept.

aarondubrow writes: We've all experienced the frustration of trying to access information on websites, only to find that the data is trapped in outdated, difficult-to-read file formats and that metadata — the critical data about the data, such as when and how and by whom it was produced — is nonexistent. Led by Kenton McHenry, a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications is working to change that. Recipients in 2013 of a $10 million, five-year award from the National Science Foundation, the team is developing software that allows researchers to manage and make sense of vast amounts of digital scientific data that is currently trapped in outdated file formats. The NCSA team recently demonstrated two publicly-available services to make the contents of uncurated data collections accessible.

3 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. The problem isn't the format of the data... by GrpA · · Score: 4, Informative

    The problem is that 99%* of data is actually trapped behind paywalls...

    Which is more of a problem than the format. If the data was available without the paywall, then the format probably wouldn't matter as much.

    GrpA

    *99% is a made-up statistic - just like the original article. I assume it means "lots..."

    --
    Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
  2. Isn't this what Splunk is for? by mlts · · Score: 4, Informative

    Isn't gathering, indexing, and trying to find heads/tails of data what Splunk is designed for? It is a commercial utility, and not cheap by any means... but at least this is one software package meant to sift through and generate reports/graphs/etc on stuff.

    Disclaimer: Not associated with them, but have ended up using their products at multiple installations with very good results (mainly keeping customers happy with a morning PDF report that all is well, with the charts to prove it.)

  3. The problem isn't the format of the data... by Vesvvi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Although you have a point, you don't understand the realities of science, data, and publishing.

    Journal articles never contain sufficient information to replicate an experiment. That's been reported multiple times and also discussed here previously indirectly: in particular there was the study about how difficult/impossible it is to reproduce research. Many jumped into the fray with the fraud claims when that report hit, but the reality is that it's just not possible to lay out every little detail in a publication, and those details matter a LOT. As a consequence, it takes a highly trained individual to carefully interpret the methods described in a journal article, and even then their success rate in reproducing the protocols won't be terrific.

    The data is not hidden behind paywalls: there is minimal useful data in the publications. Of course, the paywalls do hide the methods descriptions, which is pretty bad.

    There are two major obstacles to dissemination of useful data. This first is that the metadata is nearly always absent or incomplete, and the format issue is a subset of this problem. The second is that data is still "expensive" enough that we can't trivially just have a copy of all of it. This means that it requires careful stewardship if it's going to be archived, and no one is paying for that.