Data finds data, then people find people
Those are words by Jon Udell. Jon expands upon a quote and work done by Jeff Jonas at IBM on surveillance, security and analytics, and while that may appear to have nothing to do with scientific information, it does. In an example of Jeff’s work, Jon refers to the example where you can get two records that refer to the same person but you don’t know that they do, but then a third record appears which relates to the first two records and establish that all three refer to the same person. In this example essentially the three pieces of data find each other (not unlike the concept of transitive homology). The second example, from Jon’s own observations is even more interesting and a little more abstract.
In this example, via the act of bookmarking, there is the potential scenario of a person being introduced to a distant person. In this case, the people are connected by common data, which allows them to network to each other. Networking around common pieces of data or scientific knowledge is not unknown in the scientific community. The difference is that in the age of computers it becomes easier to develop networks (perhaps networks that don’t exist but should) around people connected by data that finds each other.
In a second post Jon encourages us to post links to public data, which he will curate. I am bookmarking the link today
Technorati Tags: Data, Social Networking, Jon Udell
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[...] In a post some months ago, I had used the following quote Data finds data, then people find people [...]
[...] If there are two people from the tech world whose blogs I would choose to read if I was given a choice of two, they might just be Jon Udell and Jeff Jonas, and they will forever be joined in my mind, cause I found Jeff via Jon. Unfortunately, I have never had a chance to meet Jon Udell, but I have had the chance to talk to Jeff. [...]
[...] David Recordon has a nice, optimistic post about the Open Web. I have long felt that the web is the ultimate platform, and the past few years have only strengthened this opinion, as we make the web more programmable and start leveraging it as a multi-way communication medium (in conjunction with such technologies as XMPP). Much of the tech community is focused on leveraging this web around social networks. My hope is that we in the scientific community can take this to the next level, literally connecting data and information first and then the people. [...]
[...] written and talked a lot about data finding data and then people finding people. Today, someone asked me what that meant in the context of social networks, etc and we ended up [...]