The Sanctity of Data

Here's a blog post from Deepak Singh at bbgm considering the properties of scientific data. Singh responds to a post from Frank Gibson outlining three criteria for representing data: content, syntax, and semantics. Singh weighs in on each characteristic, contending that a solid grasp of these, along with community agreement on rules for them, would go a long way to solving semantic problems in the field. He says, though, that he tends to disagree with people about the curation challenge. "Many believe we need humans to curate data. I don’t have an answer, but don’t believe that humans scale and we will run into scale issues at some point," he writes.