“In summary, the Tara Oceans project leverages powerful new technologies and analytical tools to develop the first planetary-scale data collection effort that links biogeography with ecology, genetics, and morphology. Guided by the cross-disciplinary philosophy the pay-offs can be immense, considering the massive number of samples and data that have been collected, archived, and interconnected for scientific study, only half-way through the expedition. A lesson from this project is that, when it comes to addressing broad and complex issues of general interest to mankind, competition between scientists may not be the best model. The Tara Oceans project is a pioneering enterprise towards a truly worldwide, systems-level characterization of the largest and most fundamental ecosystem on our planet.”
Cool. In my current job, we spend a lot of time talking to people who are combining huge and disparate sources of data and correlating, analyzing, and exploring the connections. Now, I see this happening everywhere. While the 80s-00s could be the Information Age, I’d like to call the new age we are entering the Age of Data (or something like that – it’s all about Data Analysis, innit?)
