The Role, Value, and Limits of ST Data and Information in the Public Domain for Research: Earth and Environmental Sciences

摘要

This presentation is based in part on a National Research Council report called Resolving Conflicts Arising from the Privatization of Environmental Data, which is available on the National Academies Web site. First, I want to emphasize that I am a scientist, an environmental scientist insofar as that ever exists. I am a meteorologist with some experience in oceanography, but I have made it my business over the past 20 years to learn about all my other colleagues, what they do as geologists, chemists, ecosystem people, people interested in the cryosphere, and so on. They are all environmental scientists, whether they recognize it or not. The environment sciences are not a homogeneous domain. There are many different sorts of environmental scientists. Twenty years ago, they never used to talk to each other at all. One of the great changes that has happened in the past 15 to 20 years is that there is a group of people trying to look at how the system functions as a whole and how the various pieces are interrelated. My priority in this presentation is to explain to nonscientists the special data needs of environmental science. There are some differences from the bioinformatics area. In particular, there are few startups in the environmental sciences. There are some, but not very many. The other important difference is that our topic is fundamentally international. Many environmentalists' views are global and other governments and countries are partners in that enterprise. To come to sensible public policies about the environment, we have to work collaboratively with those other nations. It simply is not feasible to devise a strategy for the United States and expect the rest of the world to follow that strategy.