So my supervisor gave me my first reading last week; “The Fourth Paradigm – Data Intensive Scientific Discovery” (The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery). I just finished going through the first chapter (an edited version of the last talk – eScience Talk at NRC-CSTB meeting – given by Jim Gray in 2007 before he got lost at sea) and I must say, it is a rather interesting book.
The foreword is especially interesting as it starts off with a classic example of how useful curated data can be; it basically talks about how Johannes Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion using Tycho Barhe’s catalog of systematic astronomical observations. Gordon Bell then describes Data-Intensive science as being comprised of three basic activities: capture, curation, and analysis.