Thursday, June 25, 2009

Meta-informatics

A common theme I've been encountering recently (The Numerati, Supercrunchers, recent Economist article on cellphone-generated data) focuses on the problem of having more data than we know how to use. There are ambitious initiatives to pull it all together (beyond Google, the crappy WolframAlpha and the semantic web, see Gapminder.org, Pachube.com). Everybody in the corporate world knows that MIS, Business Intelligence, etc, are evergreen and perennial questions.

But let's just say you've got terabytes of structured and unstructured data (as we do), how do you pose questions of it? The tabula rasa of the Google screen speaks volumes.

Where is the discipline and art of question formation taking shape, save for in the secretive halls of Madison Avenue and Langley?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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