Steps Toward Large-Scale Data Integration in the Sciences: Summary of a Workshop

Excerpt

This report summarizes a National Research Council (NRC) workshop to identify some of the major challenges that hinder large-scale data integration in the sciences and some of the technologies that could lead to solutions. The workshop was held August 19-20, 2009, in Washington, D.C. The charge to the planning committee was as follows: "To plan and organize a cross-disciplinary public workshop to explore alternative visions for achieving large-scale data integration in fields of importance to the federal government. Large-scale data integration refers to the challenge of aggregating data sets that are so large that searching or moving them is nontrivial, or to the challenge of drawing selected information from a collection (possibly large, distributed, and heterogeneous) of such sets. The workshop will address the following questions: What policy and technological trajectories are assumed by some different communities (climatology, biology, defense, and others to be decided by the committee) working on large-scale data integration? What could be achieved if the assumed policy and technological advances are realized? What are the threats to success? Who is working to address these threats?"