[ExI] Saving the data

[Anders Sandberg]

Mike Dougherty wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 4:00 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se 
> > <mailto:anders at aleph.se>> wrote:
> >
> >     This scheme would of course require funding, but also a very
> >     stable long-term organisation that can move to new media. Perhaps
> >     allowing forking would be one way (some cryptographic trickery
> >     here for the escrow) so that even amateurs might be able to run
> >     their own version with all data smaller than Y gigabytes. Sounds
> >     very much like something the Long Now Foundation might have been
> >     considering for their 10,000 year library.
> >
> >
> > It also sounds like something googleBot is already doing.  We joke 
> > about chats being "off the record" probably being stored and simply 
> > 'marked' as "off the record" until some to-be-determined statute of 
> > intellectual property runs out.  

While Google is acting as the emergency backup system for the Internet, 
it is not really backing up the scientific data I'm talking about. Sure, 
you can leave your binary dataset in an open directory, but good luck 
searching for it (try figuring out what the search string for finding 
the raw data in Millikan's droplet experiment or the raw Voyager signals 
should be, assuming they were online). Even if it happens to be backed 
up by the Wayback Machine there are issues about curatorship, data 
integrity and lack of metadata.

My point is that science (and civilization in general) lives not just on 
data, but also the metainformation that makes it understandable and the 
handling practices that allows us to trust it. Getting all scientific 
data to just have metadata is going to be tricky enough, but we should 
aim higher. Currently digital lab notebooks are being developed, but it 
will take a long while before they become really good. A friend working 
at the Karolinska Institute was told to cut and paste (paper) copies of 
all data into her lab notebook. She was running supercomputer 
simulations producing terabytes of data. She asked if it was OK to glue 
hard drives to it.


However, I think Mike is right about the privacy of data. As scientists we cannot assume our data is "ours". Sometimes this can lead to problems, like the Gillberg affair in Sweden where a court-ordered FoI request collided with the promise of privacy to parents and children in a medical trial. 

--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University