INFORMATION TAKES SHAPE

摘要

Information is not knowledge. Those four words contain one of the most vexing paradoxes of the 21st century: We are accumulating data at exponential rates, but our understanding of what is being stored is creeping along. Yet somewhere in the stupefying volume of unanalyzed facts may lurk the next epochal discovery. In fact, one emerging frontier of discovery is called data exploration, for which researchers are developing techniques combining mathematics, information science, and software design to probe and extract patterns from vast collections of information.