"We need a powerful tool to reveal patterns, trends, and outliers in the streams of data flooding us, a tool to help us gain insight into the data."
In an interview for the web science magazine Seed, SLIS faculty member Katy Börner talks about the need of a macroscope in the field of network science and data visualization. The article by T.J. Kelleher (page 51) is in the December 2008 issue.
Excerpts from Börner's notes from the interview:
"In the information age of today, knowledge and innovation are main economic drivers. But in order to better understand these processes we need tools that would help us effectively manage our collective scholarly knowledge and to convert it into economic, social and environmental wealth.
Just like we use microscopes and telescopes to see things that are too small or too far away, we are building macroscopes that help identify patterns… in very large scale datasets and ultimately data streams."
Posted December 08, 2008