Hi!
I am a synthetic biologist. I see big changes in the way we do science
and how we will publish in the future.
I see a huge need to publish all scientific data (especially raw data)
in a common free accessible data pool. This data should be machine
readable. We face in science huge data amounts, huge number of
publications. Nobody is longer able to read all the literature. We
need a computer assisted system to analyze these data and develop
novel concepts from them. We need a structuring of these data on a
higher abstraction level. We need to be able to go from abstraction to
detail.
Thus I see the Wiki data project of potentially big value for
scientist. I would like that this project could serve in that manner
the scientific community and provide standards for submission of data
for scientist. Any plans in this direction?
A bit more about the reasons, why I find this very important:
I would summarize the upcoming trend in science as this: From
Hypothesis to Data-Driven Research, or the End of the Age of Science,
and the Dawn of the Age of Systemics. We can observe a paradigm change
in science, and two computer developments are responsible. The first
is the enormous storage capacity in the cloud. The second is that a
huge number of computers have been connected and organized in social
networks. These changes have resulted in huge quantities of data and
complex systems, a problem normal science cannot solve. The
traditional hypothesis method can deal with simple correlations
between A and B. But the method fails if the problem becomes more
complex. Science has been synonymous with a separating, reductionistic
approach. Contemporary science has come to a point where we will
change the perspective from reductionism to holism. We now move to a
position that sees things together: short systemics. The data-driven
science approach changes the scientific method and results in a
practice called "science 2.0" (named after web 2.0). "Science" will
happen in the cloud, with new publishing formats such as direct
publishing on blogs and direct publishing of our data in a human and
computer readable database, new and fast ways of collaboration in
social networks, and systems theory as the new "science" paradigm.
Systems theory is already important in fields such as systems biology
and its practical application synthetic biology.see NextGen VOICES,
Science 6 January 2012: vol. 335 no. 6064 pp. 36-38 DOI:
10.1126/science.335.6064.36
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6064/36/suppl/DC1
Best
Gerd