The era of big data brings with it a sea of opportunities for development and innovation.
Guest contributor Daniela Quaglia
{credit}Image credit: SCIENTIFIC DATA/LUDIC GROUP{/credit}
Big data is here to stay. As scientists, we stand to benefit by being part of this exciting revolution. At the second Publishing Better Science through Better Data conference, held in London on October 23rd, Dr. Ewan Birney, joint associate director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and Dr. Timo Hannay, founder of SchoolDash (a website that provides statistics about schools in England), walked us through some of the opportunities that arise from working with big data.
Opportunities in biology
Birney spoke about how the increase in big data is influencing the way we do biology. He promised to give the audience “an EBI centric view of the world”. I’m glad he did, because every scientist wanting to use big data should understand how EBI can help them.
EBI takes data provided by laboratories and stores, verifies, classifies and shares it. This approach means that a wealth of molecular-biology data, from DNA sequences to full systems (such us biomolecular pathways and metabolomics data), can be found in one place. As most scientists do not want to have to work from shared data in their raw form, the institute also works with the scientific community to convert original data into useful formats. Data from the Human Genome Project provides a compelling example of how such transformations can benefit the community — as Birney pointed out, not even the most experienced researchers want to analyse such complex raw data. Continue reading