Error - data not found: precarious data and architectures of the future

Can data from organizations as prominent as NASA vanish into thin air? A grass-roots initiative lead by scientists and researchers believes it just might, and is doing everything in its power to prevent this.

Climate change is a hot topic. It played a part in the debate leading to the recent US presidential election, but its reach and the attention it is getting go way beyond. The global scientific community is not only united in its conviction that anthropogenic climate change is real, but also working in collaboration and heavily relying on data to support its research.

Much of that data comes from organizations based in the US, such as NASA's NOAA. Donald Trump, the US president elect, has repeatedly expressed his skepticism towards climate change. Could that have an impact on the availability of data for scientific research?

A group of scientists and researchers thinks so, and is working on ways to minimize the impact of such a prospect. Regardless of whether this turns out to be the case, data preservation is a significant topic going forward. We spoke with prominent members of the precarious data movement, as well as with researchers pioneering data preservation technologies, and here is what they had to say.

Precariousness: data as cultural heritage

To begin with, could the prospect of data from organizations such as NOAA vanishing be real? Matt Price & Nick Shapiro, spokespeople for EDGI (Environmental Data & Governance Initiative) think that "this is hard to judge, but we have good reasons to believe at least some and likely a high percentage of data will disappear from public view." Elaborating on these reasons, they cite:

1. The natural turnover of information, which would account for some level of attrition
2. The fact that data can be starved out of public view, by cutting off the resources necessary for its upkeep
3. Trump administration hostility to climate change research, and to environmental science and the use of evidence and reason in general
4. Historical precedents such as the legacy of former Canada administration and the attempted closing of EPA libraries under George W. Bush

Matt Zumwalt, program manager at Protocol Labs, a company developing and advocating a new distributed protocol for the web, argues that "It's not only the data that are precarious. The entire web is a precarious system because it's structured as a centralized network. This scramble to save climate data is just the latest symptom of the underlying disease of centralization. The more valuable and central these data become, the more expensive and painful it will be to continue relying on a centralized network."

EDGI:

"would suggest that scientific data is precisely a form of cultural heritage which belongs to all of us and to our descendants. While the scientific enterprise has never been perfect, it has promoted a principle vital to our societies: that anyone can propose theoretical accounts or make sense of empirical data, and be judged only on the basis of their arguments.

Without evidence, those arguments can't be made, and our common heritage of reasoned discourse disappears. So the duty to preserve data is, in our view, as strong as the duty of cultural preservation."