Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
For a long time, the researches and technologies aiming at data mainly focus
on data storage and management, such as database technology. Their primary
goal is to model real nature, rather than to take data themselves as a research
object.
The appearance of data mining technology [11] means that people began to
study the laws aiming at data in computer systems. In the field of Internet,
more and more researches focus on network behavior, network community, net-
work search, and network culture. Because of the accumulation of data, newly
disciplines, such as bioinformatics and brain informatics, are also typical dataol-
ogy centric research areas. For instance, DNA data in bioinformatics are the
data that describe natural structures of life, based on which we can study life
using computers.
Brain informatics, which emphasizes a
systematic
approach to investigat-
ing human information processing mechanisms, including measuring, collecting,
modeling, transforming, managing, mining, interpreting, and explaining multiple
forms of brain data obtained from various cognitive experiments by using power-
ful equipments, such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and EEG
(electroencephalogram) [3]. A tangible goal of brain informatics studies is to form
a brain data area with a conceptual brain data model namely
Data-Brain
,which
represents functional relationships among multiple human brain data sources,
with respect to all major aspects and capabilities of human information process-
ing systems (HIPS), for systematic investigation and understanding of human
intelligence. In fact, Data-Brain construction is to form brain data area in com-
puter. On one hand, developing such a Data-Brain is a core research issue of
brain informatics. Systematic brain informatics research needs a Data-Brain to
describe related knowledge and to annotate various human brain data sources,
in order to support data sharing and data integration. Based on this way, it
provides a long-term, holistic vision to uncover the principles and mechanisms
of underlying HIPS. On the other hand, the brain informatics methodology sup-
ports such a Data-Brain construction. The Data-Brain is used to model various
human brain data related knowledge, involving data themselves, data production
and data disposal.
Thus, we need a special discipline
dataology
andpaymuchattentiontostudy-
ing data themselves. Dataology is an umbrella of theories, methods and tech-
nologies for studying data nature. It will provide basic theories and methods for
many (maybe all) disciplines and fields, including
data acquisition
,
data analy-
sis
,
data awareness
,
data management
, etc. These basic theories and methods
will be applied on various fields for developing special theories, methods and
technologies, which will form dataology for specific domains.
The main research issues of dataology are:
-
To form data areas in various domains;
Massive datasets have driven research, applications, and tool development in
business, science, government, and academia. The continued growth in data
collection in all of these areas ensures the fundamental problem of dataology
addresses, namely how the component (i.e., data area) of data nature is
