Special issue on data-intensive science.

What do you get when you gather approximately 100 people from different disciplines, different backgrounds, and different institutions into one workshop and ask them to identify issues, problems, and challenges? No matter what the topic, plenty of discussion will follow. In this case, the workshop was the NSF-supported Data-Intensive Science (DIS) Workshop held at Seattle Children’s Research Institute on September 19–20, 2010. The imperative nature of this topic was further reinforced by a recent issue of Science (Feb. 11, 2011). The workshop participants included researchers, funding representatives, computer scientists, analysis and computational experts, statisticians, educators, business leaders, and policy makers. The end result? A thorough examination of the state of data-intensive biological discovery and the computing environment in which it exists, and the challenges it faces.