The following is an excerpt from Phill Jones’ recent white paper The Top Trends in Knowledge and Information Management. Download the full paper here.
Data integration is increasingly important. The increase in momentum behind it mirrors a broader movement in science generally to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).
FAIR data owes its origins to open science trends in academia. The concept is gaining traction and has been expanded upon by commercial companies to include internally FAIR data as a guiding principle to ensure that all results are adequately documented. As a researcher that I spoke to said:
“…in our electronic lab notebook, the guidelines of how we’re supposed to keep records is that anybody with a similar skill set and equally qualified should be able to follow the steps and obtain the same results.”
The philosophy behind FAIR has deeper implications than good data stewardship and reproducibility. The concept of interoperability can extend beyond data and include any class of information object. As people are becoming increasingly skilled in making data consistent, it naturally becomes easier for machines to read it. As machines become increasingly better at reading natural language and unstructured data sources, automated processing of information becomes increasingly powerful. In the long term, these two approaches will converge and there will be no meaningful distinction between the way we handle data and documents. It will all just be information.
For the immediate future, knowledge and information managers should keep a close eye on semantic search approaches such as topic extraction and assertion mapping. While those approaches continue to mature, the use of curated taxonomies, full text, and fully aggregated search that cuts across databases of all kinds, literature, and document stores can significantly decrease the amount time spent searching for the right piece of information.
Keep learning:
- Download Phill Jones’ white paper: The Top Trends in Knowledge and Information Management
- Read a related blog post: What are FAIR Data Principles?
- Learn how one pharmaceutical company is bringing FAIR data to life: FAIR Data in Action Case Study
- Contact us to learn more about data integration solutions