From Nextgov: NOAA awards contract to manage huge stores of environmental data
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signed a contract on Monday to help manage an archive of environmental data, which by 2020 will store more information than all the material printed in the world since Gutenberg.
COMMENTS
- As a Computer Scientist I must confess to some trepidation about collecting "more data than printed since the time of Gutenberg" in a multi-peta byte data store. There is definitely a point where more is not better, and this presses close to it. This comment does not mean that I can't understand the use of so much data nor what the scientists at NOAA and NCAR intend to do with it. I'm no Luddite! But I detect an untoward pride in being able to store so much for its own sake. That is not the point -- and if it were, perhaps we should have a Big Science project to collect and store the path and state of every atom on earth for the past billion years (One Googleplex byte of data). (I hope you can see the absurdity of that proposition!) The point is understanding. When you've used that mass of data to build up and verify your understanding of the forces and interactions at work, it is the understanding that is important to retain -- the data is ephemeral. So relish the ability to save much data, but don't wallow in it -- keep your eyes on the prize!! RD Right Posted June 26, 2008 5:37 PM
