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Big Data

Editorial
- - - Community cleverness required
    - Researchers need to adapt their institutions and practices in response to torrents of new data — and need to complement smart science with smart searching.
    - 3 September 2008
Special Report
- - - The next Google
    - Ten years ago this month, Google's first employee turned up at the garage where the search engine was originally housed. What technology at a similar early stage today will have changed our world as much by 2018? Nature asked some researchers and business people to speculate — or lay out their wares. Their responses are wide ranging, but one common theme emerges: the integration of the worlds of matter and information, whether it be by the blurring of boundaries between online and real environments, touchy-feely feedback from a phone or chromosomes tucked away on databases.
    - 3 September 2008
Column: Party of One
- - - Data wrangling
    - Collecting and releasing environmental data have stirred up controversy in Washington, says David Goldston, and will continue to do so.
    - 3 September 2008
Features
- - - Welcome to the petacentre
    - What does it take to store bytes by the tens of thousands of trillions? Cory Doctorow meets the people and machines for which it's all in a day's work.
    - 3 September 2008
  - - Wikiomics
    - Pioneering biologists are trying to use wiki-type web pages to manage and interpret data, reports Mitch Waldrop. But will the wider research community go along with the experiment?
    - 3 September 2008
Commentary
- - - How do your data grow?
    - Scientists need to ensure that their results will be managed for the long haul. Maintaining data takes big organization, says Clifford Lynch.
    - 3 September 2008
Books & Arts
- - - Distilling meaning from data
    - Buried in vast streams of data are clues to new science. But we may need to craft new lenses to see them, explain Felice Frankel and Rosalind Reid.
    - 3 September 2008
Essay
- - - The Harvard computers
    - The first mass data crunchers were people, not machines. Sue Nelson looks at the discoveries and legacy of the remarkable women of Harvard's Observatory.
    - 3 September 2008
Review
- - - The future of biocuration
    - To thrive, the field that links biologists and their data urgently needs structure, recognition and support.
    - 3 September 2008
Podcast Extra
- - - Podcast Extra: Big Data
    - As Google celebrates its 10th anniversary, we find out how science is coping with massive datasets generated by unprecedented computing power. BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow tells us about his visits to the LHC data storage facility and the genome sequencing Sanger Centre.
    - 3 September 2008