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"Traditionally, data has been a scarce commodity which, given its value, has been either jealously guarded or expensively traded. In recent years, technological developments and political lobbying have turned this position on its head. Data now flow as a deep and wide torrent, are low in cost and supported by robust infrastructures, and are increasingly open and accessible. A data revolution is underway, one that is already reshaping how knowledge is produced, business conducted, and governance enacted, as well as raising many questions concerning surveillance, privacy, security, profiling, social sorting, and intellectual property rights. In contrast to the hype and hubris of much media and business coverage, The Data Revolution provides a synoptic and critical analysis of the emerging data landscape."--Excerpted from publisher's description

This essay examines the "era of big data" through the lens of recent attempts at its application within the realm of public health. Arguing that debates about big data's newness or usefulness are misplaced, I suggest that big data is less about finding solutions to complex social problems than it is about discovering better — and more relevant — research questions.

It is challenging to standardize data; yet, the capabilities to draw upon data across information systems hold huge potential for improving defense acquisition and procurement. Acquisition planning and management involves many decision-making and action-taking processes that cover a complex environment including actual acquisition, contracting, fiscal, legal, personnel, and regulatory requirements. A sound decision-making process has to rely on data;high quality data. Often the available data is dirty, outdated, incomplete, or insufficient for the expert to make a decision. On the other hand, there are enormous amounts of data on the web that can be utilized to crystalize the needed information. These data repositories are often publicly accessible and from a variety of sources including websites, government reports, news, wikis, blogs, online forums, and social media. This paper investigates how to leverage the information in public data sources to complement the internal data in order to support effective acquisition planning and management. This research is based on publicly available government acquisition databases at usaspending.gov and fpds.gov. It takes a data science approach for analyzing acquisition databases and focuses on two major tasks: (1) research on leveraging the web data for quality assessment and improvement of federal acquisition data and (2) research on appropriate data analytic techniques to discover useful information that can potentially help federal acquisition management and planning process. ; Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Program

AbstractIn this essay, I observe that data is valuable not only for what it is, but also for what it will become: that is, that data is a form of potential. I explore two aspects of this by drawing two comparisons with other forms of potential: ova and genes. First, building on ethnographic fieldwork with environmental scientists and technicians in the Brazilian Amazon, I compare data processing with ova donation in the United Kingdom in order to explore how data processing might be considered a form of reproductive labour. I then turn to emergent big data infrastructures in the environmental sciences, and compare the environmental sciences with genomics, in order to gesture towards some critical questions that need to be asked of such open data initiatives. I end with a reflection on comparison as a privileged means of drawing out the forms understood to be latent within data.

Over the past decade, the public awareness and availability as well as methods for the creation and use of spatial data on the Web have steadily increased. Besides the establishment of governmental Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs), numerous volunteered and commercial initiatives had a major impact on that development. Nevertheless, data isolation still poses a major challenge. Whereas the majority of approaches focuses on data provision, means to dynamically link and combine spatial data from distributed, often heterogeneous data sources in an ad hoc manner are still very limited. However, such capabilities are essential to support and enhance information retrieval for comprehensive spatial decision making. To facilitate spatial data fusion in current SDIs, this thesis has two main objectives. First, it focuses on the conceptualization of a service-based fusion process to functionally extend current SDI and to allow for the combination of spatial data from different spatial data services. It mainly addresses the decomposition of the fusion process into well-defined and reusable functional building blocks and their implementation as services, which can be used to dynamically compose meaningful application-specific processing workflows. Moreover, geoprocessing patterns, i.e. service chains that are commonly used to solve certain fusion subtasks, are designed to simplify and automate workflow composition. Second, the thesis deals with the determination, description and exploitation of spatial data relations, which play a decisive role for spatial data fusion. The approach adopted is based on the Linked Data paradigm and therefore bridges SDI and Semantic Web developments. Whereas the original spatial data remains within SDI structures, relations between those sources can be used to infer spatial information by means of Semantic Web standards and software tools. A number of use cases were developed, implemented and evaluated to underpin the proposed concepts. Particular emphasis was put on the use of established open standards to realize an interoperable, transparent and extensible spatial data fusion process and to support the formalized description of spatial data relations. The developed software, which is based on a modular architecture, is available online as open source. It allows for the development and seamless integration of new functionality as well as the use of external data and processing services during workflow composition on the Web. ; Die Entwicklung des Internet im Laufe des letzten Jahrzehnts hat die Verfügbarkeit und öffentliche Wahrnehmung von Geodaten, sowie Möglichkeiten zu deren Erfassung und Nutzung, wesentlich verbessert. Dies liegt sowohl an der Etablierung amtlicher Geodateninfrastrukturen (GDI), als auch an der steigenden Anzahl Communitybasierter und kommerzieller Angebote. Da der Fokus zumeist auf der Bereitstellung von Geodaten liegt, gibt es jedoch kaum Möglichkeiten die Menge an, über das Internet verteilten, Datensätzen ad hoc zu verlinken und zusammenzuführen, was mitunter zur Isolation von Geodatenbeständen führt. Möglichkeiten zu deren Fusion sind allerdings essentiell, um Informationen zur Entscheidungsunterstützung in Bezug auf raum-zeitliche Fragestellungen zu extrahieren. Um eine ad hoc Fusion von Geodaten im Internet zu ermöglichen, behandelt diese Arbeit zwei Themenschwerpunkte. Zunächst wird eine dienstebasierten Umsetzung des Fusionsprozesses konzipiert, um bestehende GDI funktional zu erweitern. Dafür werden wohldefinierte, wiederverwendbare Funktionsblöcke beschrieben und über standardisierte Diensteschnittstellen bereitgestellt. Dies ermöglicht eine dynamische Komposition anwendungsbezogener Fusionsprozesse über das Internet. Des weiteren werden Geoprozessierungspatterns definiert, um populäre und häufig eingesetzte Diensteketten zur Bewältigung bestimmter Teilaufgaben der Geodatenfusion zu beschreiben und die Komposition und Automatisierung von Fusionsprozessen zu vereinfachen. Als zweiten Schwerpunkt beschäftigt sich die Arbeit mit der Frage, wie Relationen zwischen Geodatenbeständen im Internet erstellt, beschrieben und genutzt werden können. Der gewählte Ansatz basiert auf Linked Data Prinzipien und schlägt eine Brücke zwischen diensteorientierten GDI und dem Semantic Web. Während somit Geodaten in bestehenden GDI verbleiben, können Werkzeuge und Standards des Semantic Web genutzt werden, um Informationen aus den ermittelten Geodatenrelationen abzuleiten. Zur Überprüfung der entwickelten Konzepte wurde eine Reihe von Anwendungsfällen konzipiert und mit Hilfe einer prototypischen Implementierung umgesetzt und anschließend evaluiert. Der Schwerpunkt lag dabei auf einer interoperablen, transparenten und erweiterbaren Umsetzung dienstebasierter Fusionsprozesse, sowie einer formalisierten Beschreibung von Datenrelationen, unter Nutzung offener und etablierter Standards. Die Software folgt einer modularen Struktur und ist als Open Source frei verfügbar. Sie erlaubt sowohl die Entwicklung neuer Funktionalität durch Entwickler als auch die Einbindung existierender Daten- und Prozessierungsdienste während der Komposition eines Fusionsprozesses.

Our world is being transformed by big data. The growth of the Internet and the rapid expansion of mobile communications and related technologies have created a massive flow of data--both structured and unstructured. The availability and use of that data has enormous implications for businesses and for the wider society. Used effectively, big data can drive businesses in the direction of more accurate analyses of vital information, leading ultimately to greater operational efficiencies, cost reductions, reduced risk, speedier innovations, and increased and new revenue. In this book, you'll find detailed instruction in big data strategy development and implementation, supported by numerous real-world business cases in ten distinct industries. You will learn what big data is and how to wield it--from calculating ROI and making a business case to developing overall and project-specific strategies that actually work. Each chapter answers key questions and will give you the skills you need to make your big data projects succeed

Welcome to the IASSIST Quarterly first issue of 2021 and of volume 45 (IQ 45(1) 2021).
I always find it interesting to learn more about other research areas. Often, I find approaches in less well-known areas can be transformed and transferred to my own areas, or make me aware of problems unwisely ignored hitherto and becoming potentials. In the case of the first article, you will become aware of the connection with linguistics from a data viewpoint. As a search for datasets requires using words of a language it is obvious that linguistic knowledge can be of benefit. However, most is obvious when you think of it - afterwards. Often, it is because you did not think it through - beforehand - that new information surprises you. And this also gives you a good opportunity to thank people who are working in areas you had not thought of - before. The benefits of combining and merging types of data such as linking survey data and social media data are obvious - again! Before you start the journey of joining these types of data, the second article will provide you with valuable information gained from the experience of several projects and exemplified through cases using Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
The first article shows the support for diversity in research areas already in the title: 'A recommendation to the SSH community: take a linguist on board' authored by Jeannine Beeken of UK Data Service at University of Essex (UK). Theories and methods of linguistics are obviously relevant for data services where the search for and retrieval of data collections from vast data archives is an important step in the process towards analysis and findings in data. Beeken starts by introducing us to areas of this important retrieval step that are supported by Natural Language Processing (NLP) that increases findability, with the result that relevant descriptions of data collections are identified through online search. A simple example is that when searching for survey questions concerning 'war' the results will also include those from a search for 'armed conflict'. The development and upkeep of thesauri and language relationships is a huge and valuable task that is itself supported by linguistics and computers, for example by intelligent creation of metadata for studies. Linguistic knowledge is not only relevant for finding data but also valuable for the production of data. Computer linguistics have made great progress for the growing number of studies based on texts and data in the form of interviews. In the article, speech recognition and speech-to-text transcription is mentioned and the resulting interview transcription text can again become the subject of further computer and linguistic analysis.
The second article 'Informed consent for linking survey and social media data - differences between platforms and data types' will prepare you for benefits and obstacles when joining data from surveys and social media. The article is a part of the outcomes of several projects with participation of the authors Johannes Breuer, Tarek Al Baghal, Luke Sloan, Libby Bishop, Dimitra Kondyli, and Apostolos Linardis. The authors are based at GESIS in Germany, Essex University and Cardiff University in the UK, and EKKE in Greece. The article draws on their own projects as well as on specific other projects delivering the examples in the article.
When using self-reporting in research surveys - in this case for the study of social media - the data can prove to be unreliable. On the other hand, when research obtains data directly from the social media platforms the background, attitude, and behaviour variables for individuals are sparse compared to surveys. The obvious solution is to link such data collections. However, the linking requires informed consent. The 'joining of data' and 'informed consent' implies awareness of legal regulations - like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe - as well as ethical standards and guidelines of relevant institutions. The article discusses these issues and demonstrates them through three studies that used data from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Furthermore, the regulations and setups for the social platforms have to be well scrutinized. For example, if respondents share their private data, these may also affect the privacy rights of others, and data that are collected via APIs may have special restrictions with regard to data sharing. The appendices of the article contain the full text used in the various projects for explicating the use of data and the conditions in the linking of survey and social media data. In addition to raising general awareness and giving a good overview of problems when using social media data, the article will initiate you into being well prepared, as the cases discussed include many valuable references to pursue if you plan on commencing a project linking social media data with survey data.
Enjoy the reading.

Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing such a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution. Doing that after the event also gives you the opportunity of improving your work after feedback. We encourage you to login or create an author profile at https://www.iassistquarterly.com (our Open Journal System application). We permit authors to have 'deep links' into the IQ as well as deposition of the paper in your local repository. Chairing a conference session or workshop with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the limited number of session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST Quarterly website at https://www.iassistquarterly.com. Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout:
https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions
Authors can also contact me directly via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you.
Karsten Boye Rasmussen - March 2021