Communications of the ACM
National Science Board Talks "big Data"
The National Science Board, the governing board of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), recently held a panel discussion exploring the data challenges facing the future of science and engineering research. A key goal of the meeting was to identify guiding principles for establishing policies on data and artifacts.
The participants, which included experts from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, agreed that data-intensive research could change how NSF operates, starting with the way in which proposals are evaluated. Although data-intensive science is about big data, it also creates multiple environments for data-intensive applications throughout the data-compute-distribution spectrum, says Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Fran Berman.
Several themes came out of the meeting that could shed light on the state of data in science and engineering, including the fact that the government has become a big contributor in generating data for science. Another theme is that some communities, particularly neuroscience, have big data federation problems. The participants also agreed that a major challenge is trust, in that different parties must trust one another's data sets.
From Computing Community Consortium
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