At LIFT 08 last week, François Grey gave a great talk about the intersection of grid computing, crowdsourcing, and science.
One thing that miffed me was when he was talking about the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) creating huge amounts of data per collision of protons. I don’t agree with people who stress the amount of data an experiment produces, comparing it to all the knowledge humanity has produced.
Data is not knowledge.
The LHC indeed will produce oceans and oceans of data, but the amount of knowledge will be much smaller. Indeed, when they make their big discoveries, each will be expressed in a simple hyperlinked publication – a regular scientific paper.
But for some knowledge creation you need lots of data 🙂
> Data is not knowledge.
It sure isn’t. And as we are increasingly moving from “information work” to “web work”, this distinction becomes increasingly important.
Data is not information.
Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not understanding.
As people are increasingly outsourcing their data storage and processing to the web etc, true understanding of phenomenons seems to become increasingly valuable (or scarce resource) for the web worker, compared with accumulating data.
Methinks.