Rethinking data
"Data! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay." — Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches . Data may be the preeminent obsession of our age [1] . We marvel at the ever-growing quantity of data on the Internet , and fortunes are made when Google sells shares for the first time on the stock market. We worry about how corporations and governments collect, protect, and share our personal information. A beloved character on a television science fiction show is named Data. We spend billions of dollars to convert the entire human genome into digital data, and having completed that, barely pause for breath before launching similar and even larger bioinformatic endeavours. All this attention being paid to data reflects a real societal transformation as ubiquitous computing and the Internet refashion our economy and, in some respects, our lives. However, as with other important transformations—think of Darwin's theory of na...