Jon Udell on data

July 5, 2007

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

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