Big Data and Open Source Unlock Genetic Secrets

The world is experiencing an unprecedented data deluge, a reality that my colleague Edd Dumbill described as another "industrial revolution" at February's Strata Conference. Many sectors of the global economy are waking up to the need to use data as a strategic resource, whether in media, medicine, or moving trucks. Open data has been a major focus of Gov 2.0, as federal and state governments move forward with creating new online platforms for open government data.

The explosion of data requires new tools and management strategies. These new approaches include more than technical evolution, as a recent conversation with Charlie Quinn, director of data integration technologies at the Benaroya Research Institute, revealed: they involve cultural changes that create greater value by sharing data between institutions. In Quinn's field, genomics, big data is far from a buzzword, with scanned sequences now rating on the terabyte scale.