[okfn-discuss] Forget Big Data, Small Data is the Real Revolution

[Jose Leal]

I left this comment on Rufus's great blog post, thought I'd share it here
too:

I would agree that the whole "Big Data" meme is yet another bubble. Not too
dissimilar to those of social media, cloud etc. Not to say that they are
not relevant, but they are just an evolution of the digital space.

People have always wanted to connect and share, so in that sense social
media is simply a digital fulfillment of that human need. The cloud is also
an evolution to hosted solutions. Again, not much new there. It's been a
long time since most of us have hosted our own websites, or email servers
etc. Those trends will continue, but they will not revolutionize how our
world works.

You're right, Small Data is the future. I think "Small, Open and Linked
Data" (SOLD) that is the future! But, where as the others are incremental
evolution of the digital space, SOLD is what has the potential to change
our society. Distribute creation, access, updating, linking, and most
importantly control.

Let's learn to value small, not big. Let's learn to value open, not
proprietary. Let's learn to value connected, not silos. I'm SOLD ;-)


Jose Leal

wikiDOMO.com

Open Marketplace

Open Address

jose at wikiDOMO.com


On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 10:28 AM, Laurent Romary <laurent.romary at inria.fr>wrote:

> That's typically the case in several fields in the humanities where the
> complexity is in the representation refinement of the source, not
> necessarily the quantity.
> Laurent
>
> Le 22 avr. 2013 à 15:52, Peter Murray-Rust a écrit :
>
> I have been pushing this idea in STEM for about 5 years under the heading
> (from Jim Downing) "Long-tail science". This emphasizes the heterogeneity
> and the large number of sets. In practice (at least in sciences which want
> to publish data) "big data" is already recognized and even often supported
> by funders. Long-tail data is a myriad of Cinderellas.
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I wanted to let folks know about this post which has just gone up:
>>
>>
>> http://blog.okfn.org/2013/04/22/forget-big-data-small-data-is-the-real-revolution/
>>
>> <quote>
>> There is a lot of talk about “big data” at the moment. For example,
>> this is Big Data Week, which will see events about big data in dozens
>> of cities around the world. But the discussions around big data miss a
>> much bigger and more important picture: the real opportunity is not
>> big data, but small data. Not centralized “big iron”, but
>> decentralized data wrangling. Not“one ring to rule them all” but
>> “small pieces loosely joined”.
>> </quote>
>>
>> Very interested to hear people's thoughts - this will be first in a
>> series.
>>
>> Rufus
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> okfn-discuss mailing list
>> okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
> _______________________________________________
> okfn-discuss mailing list
> okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
>
>
> Laurent Romary
> INRIA & HUB-IDSL
> laurent.romary at inria.fr
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> okfn-discuss mailing list
> okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/attachments/20130422/05b8e641/attachment.html>