Avoiding a digital Dark Age

The patient development and disciplined application of community standards is the key to ensuring the golden age of mutual intelligibility does not turn into a dark age of tribal confusion.

The promised golden age includes sophisticated public services for search, discovery, access, analysis, visualisation, fusion, submission and presentation of research. For this to work we need intelligent data; the raw data needs to be structured, described, and “marked up” with meta-information.

This applies to scholarly literature as much as to data sets, because even text files need to be structured and marked up with discipline specific meta-tags to participate in sophisticated bibliographic, data-mining and discovery services.

In the dark age of information, we bequeath to our sons and daughters an unending sea of ones and zeros with no standard structure, description, or provenance data. Extracting useful information from this “dumb data” will be a time-consuming process.

The golden age is predicated on openness, a willingness to grant access to scholarly outputs and research data. With the advent of the World Wide Web as a core part of popular culture, there is a new expectation that everything should be findable and accessible online. And commonly available software empowers authors and data scientists to self-publish their work.

Copyright and digital rights management are not necessarily risks to this openness. The risks lie rather with the general ignorance of the rights and responsibilities in this area or with the lack (or non-adoption) of clear protocols for expressing these rights.

Openness of research data has social barriers in some disciplines where primacy and sole use of data is important to academic reputation. Other disciplines have adopted at a community level a greater expectation of immediate open access to research data.

Advances in ICT technology are enabling the prospect of a golden age of research information. However the barbarians are massing outside the empire, and unless we invest to secure digital longevity, persistent identification, interoperability, richness of data, and open access, a regression into a digital dark age is also possible.