[Data-Mongers] Noon Monday, 6/27 Informatics Talk - J. Futrelle - Data is the Network: Link or Die

[Holly Miller]

The next Informal Lunch Talk will be:

When: Noon, Monday, June 27, 2011
Where: 103 Lillie on the MBL Campus (map)
Who: Joe Futrelle, WHOI
Title: Data is the Network: Link or Die

Summary:

In a world now dominated by social networking and wireless communication, most scientific information remains stubbornly locked up in specialized databases, institutional repositories and domain-specific applications. New strategies are needed to free all of this information from the rigid containers, frameworks and work processes in which it is born and increasingly dies. In particular, software engineering must be rethought so that interoperability, openness, and extensibility are designed into data structures. Can data be organized as an active, evolving, open network of heterogeneous concerns and affordances, free of the control of any single software agent or framework? This talk, originally given by invitation at Harvard IIC in 2009, attempts to challenge the assumptions that software controls data, and that data producers control semantics, and to show that decentralized data architectures can mitigate the complexity and lack of control encountered at the global scale.

About the speaker:

Joe Futrelle is an Ocean Informaticist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Previously he was a Senior Research Coordinator at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications where he worked extensively on designing and implementing scientific data management systems, including applications in astronomy, biology, medicine, seismology, earthquake engineering, environmental hydrology, and music information retrieval.


See you Monday!

Holly Miller 
hmiller at mbl.edu

Anne Thessen 
athessen at eol.org

Andrew Maffei 
amaffei at whoi.edu
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