One of the stories floating around tech memeorandum was the news of the Google Drive. The concept is interesting: storing 100% of a users data online. I will not get into the merits or demerits of that argument here, but the article also refered to a movie since renamed Epic 2015. The movie talks about the Google Grid,
…a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.
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This got me thinking about the day where data storage is no longer an issue. Companies and institutions could sequence every genome known, solve the structure of every known protein and identify every interaction in the human body and theoretically store it on a universal grid. How would we control access? Who would control it? Should the raw data by itself be fundamentally open (my personal preference) with the value lying in how the data are interpreted and used? Should the government be involved? Would we restrict access from certain countries? Hopefully these questions will be answered before the problems really arise.
The other problem of course is getting the data from one place to another, a more difficult problem, although a recent IBM announcement suggest that there is a good amount of work going on in that area as well.
Infinite Storage
One of the stories floating around tech memeorandum was the news of the Google Drive. The concept is interesting: storing 100% of a users data online. I will not get into the merits or demerits of that argument here, but the article also refered to a movie since renamed Epic 2015. The movie talks about the Google Grid,
.
This got me thinking about the day where data storage is no longer an issue. Companies and institutions could sequence every genome known, solve the structure of every known protein and identify every interaction in the human body and theoretically store it on a universal grid. How would we control access? Who would control it? Should the raw data by itself be fundamentally open (my personal preference) with the value lying in how the data are interpreted and used? Should the government be involved? Would we restrict access from certain countries? Hopefully these questions will be answered before the problems really arise.
The other problem of course is getting the data from one place to another, a more difficult problem, although a recent IBM announcement suggest that there is a good amount of work going on in that area as well.
Technorati Tags: Data, Google, Storage, Universal Grid, Information, Informatics