I have been working for the last decade to get all scientific data and literature online and cross-indexed. Progress has been astonishing, but the real changes are going to happen in the next decade. First I will talk about what is happening to scientific literature – the funding agencies are forcing it into the public domain. Then I will discuss scientific data which traditionally has been hoarded by investigators (with notable exceptions). The forced electronic publication of scientific literature and data poses some deep technical questions: just exactly how does anyone read and understand it? How can we preserve so that it will be readable in a century? I have been pursuing these questions in Geography (with http://TerraService.Net), Astronomy (with the World-Wide telescope – e.g. http://SkyServer.Sdss.org and http://www.ivoa.net/) and more recently in bio informatics (with portable PubMedCentral). Incidental to this, each intellectual discipline X is building an X-informatics and computational-X branch. It is those branches in collaboration with Computer Science that are faced with solving these issues.
Speaker Biography
Jim Gray is part of Microsoft’s research group. His work focuses on databases and transaction processing. Jim is active in the research community, is an ACM, NAE, NAS, and AAAS Fellow, and received the ACM Turing Award for his work on transaction processing. He edits of a series of books on data management, and has been active in building online databases like http://terraService.Net and http://skyserver.sdss.org.