Jim Gray on eScience: a transformed scientific method

e have to do better at producing tools to support the whole research cycle—from data capture and data curation to data analysis and data visualization. Today, the tools for capturing data both at the mega-scale and at the milli-scale are just dreadful. After you have captured the data, you need to curate it before you can start doing any kind of data analysis, and we lack good tools for both data curation and data analysis. Then comes the publication of the results of your research, and the published literature is just the tip of the data iceberg. By this I mean that people collect a lot of data and then reduce this down to some number of column inches in Science or Nature—or 10 pages if it is a computer science person writing. So what I mean by data iceberg is that there is a lot of data that is collected but not curated or published in any systematic way. There are some exceptions, and I think that these cases are a good place for us to look for best practices. I will talk about how the whole process of peer review has got to change and the way in which I think it is changing and what CSTB can do to help all of us get access to our research. w