Scientists are increasingly awash in data

Chronicle of Higher Education : “Scientists are wasting much of the data they are creating.” Thus begins Josh Fischman’s Chronicle news story about a recent and paradoxical trend. As computers become more powerful and disk drives become more capacious, researchers are finding that they cannot easily make use of the troves of data that they and their colleagues are creating. Besides the shear volume of data being produced by the world’s labs, another big problem is the incompatibility of data across studies and disciplines. Standardizing formats and tagging would help, as would central, easy-to-use data depositories.