Speculations

26.3 Speculations

Speculation about the long-term future of scientific data access infrastructure.

Format obsolescence will not be an issue, with new software supporting old formats
Semantic web technologies will add more meaning to online data
Observational data will be generated too fast to store, so filtering it will become as important as storing it
Data access will be primarily by coordinates instead of index ranges
Valuable data will be lost for lack of organizational support for data stewardship and preservation
Someone will figure out how to create a Wikipedia for data (maybe based on Google Wave technology)
Format-independent data conventions will evolve incrementally and collaboratively
Large parallel simulation models for climate and forecasting will continue to need more computing resources than are available