Jim Hendler: Broad Data: What happens when the Web of Data becomes real?

This is an MIT talk, occurring shortly before our monthly meetup, and we've gotten permission for up to 30 meetup members to attend. RSVP required.

Broad Data: What happens when the Web of Data becomes real?

Jim Hendler
Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute
USA

"Big Data" is used to refer to the very large datasets generated by scientists, to the many petabytes of data held by companies like Facebook and Google, and to analyzing real-time data assets like the stream of twitter messages emerging from events around the world. Key areas of interest include technologies to manage much larger datasets (cf. NoSQL), technologies for the visualization and analysis of databases, cloud-based data management and datamining algorithms.

Recently, however, we have begun to see the emergence of another, and equally compelling data challenge -- that of the "Broad data" that emerges from millions and millions of raw datasets available on the World Wide Web. For broad data the new challenges that emerge include Web-scale data search and discovery, rapid and potentially ad hoc integration of datasets, visualization and analysis of only-partially modeled datasets, and issues relating to the policies for data use, reuse and combination. In this talk, we present the broad data challenge and discuss potential starting points for solutions. We illustrate these approaches using data from a "meta-catalog" of over 1,000,000 open datasets that have been collected from about two hundred governments from around the world.

Bio:
Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Head of the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Experimental Multimedia Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), serves as a Director of the UK’s charitable Web Science Trust and is a visiting Professor at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK. Hendler is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. Hendler was named one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine and was selected as an “Internet Web Expert” by the US government.