It was a long way to come for a one-day workshop so I was hoping it would be a good event. It was.
The Joint Research Center is described as the European Commission’s in-house science service. Within it exists an Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. I guess it was inspired by the Office of Technology Assessment that the US created in 1972 and shut down in the Gingrichian frenzy in the mid 1990s. The US OTA was about current technology, but the IPTS has a future focus, as indicated by the Prospective in the title.
So it was good that they organized this event about big data, clearly a subject that is at the frontier of everything: hardware, software, applications, policy, impact on social science, . . . .
It’s an inherent silo buster that will compel scholars and policy makers who want to make full use of it to transcend the various disciplinary and organizational boundaries we have established to make our lives easier. I know that life without those boundaries is difficult in many respects: the very “languages” we use to work up and communicate our research, the methods we use to ensure quality, and so on. But transcend we must.
The event had active engagement from EuroStat and European statistical agencies, from the open data team at the World Bank, from Orange, perhaps the telecom company most engaged with data for development and so on.
We debated the representativeness question, not in the abstract, but in relation to a specific data source, Wageindicator. A senior official from Elsevier talked about how actual use of information is likely to supplant citations.
What impressed me was the engagement of non-ICT researchers from the JRC. Big data is about data and information, and most of it is generated through ICTs, including the subset that we’re fixated on. But this is bigger than ICTs. It’s relevant to transportation, to energy, to the functioning of markets . . . And it was impressive that these researchers came, and stayed to the end.
I provided the slides I used in a previous post.
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