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Data needs to be Discoverable, Accessible, and Consumable

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While the Data Deluge is upon on the scientific communities, how to manage and share the scientific data is still a challenge.  To really allow data to be useful for scientists and general consumers data needs to be Discoverable, Accessible, and Consumable.

Discoverable – How do you find the data?  Searching for data via search engines is not the right way to find the information.  Sites like data.gov is a good start for getting to scientific data, but how to find the smaller pots of data.

Accessible – To do anything useful with the information/data – it needs to be made available – that means the data needs to be easily downloaded, not hidden behind many web pages and locked up behind passwords. 

Consumable – it needs to be straight forward (one-click) to bring the data into applications for analysis (ie. Excel, MatLab, etc).  Put it into the hands of the users.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2009
    Well said. We could also add "Sharable" (whatever that means). And another thing perhaps is "click and code": that data should be accessible either by a person clicking, or by a machine agent on behalf of a person.