The data deluge

<p>Next week I&#8217;m facilitating the &#8216;<a href="http://www.morst.govt.nz/about/News/Data-Matters/">Research Data Matters</a>&#8216; workshop for The Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, National Library of New Zealand and the Royal Society of New Zealand. This is a one-day event to discuss issues surrounding the long-term management of publicly-funded research data.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve been working on research data policy issues with MoRST for about seven years now and its exciting to see how far we&#8217;ve come in that time. One of my oft collaborators at MoRST last week asked me whether I&#8217;d seen any infographics that represented the &#8216;data deluge&#8217;, in particular the figures cited in <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2004/pub_datadeluge.as... article by that name</a> from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jisc">Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)</a> in the UK.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve seen some excellent ones on the <a href="http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/facts-about-the-internet/">size of the Internet</a>, and <a href="http://www.webcooltips.com/infographic-on-the-sizes-beyond-gigabyte.html... storage volumes</a>, but nothing of that nature, so I decided to make one. This uses physical objects to show the relative scale of moving from a megabyte up to an exabyte. Click the image for a larger version:</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><a href="http://seradigm.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/datadeluge-infographic.gif"><img src="http://seradigm.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/datadeluge-infographic-sm.gif" alt="data deluge infographic" border="0" height="272" width="600" /></a></p>
<p>Apparently the current size of the Internet is estimated at 5 trillion terabytes, or 5 exabytes. I note the JISC article is from late 2004, so estimates on the total annual production of information may well have gone up by then.</p>
<p>For those particularly interested the actual sizes, they&#8217;re not precisely scaled by 1,000 each time, but are fairly close. Here are the numbers:</p>
<table align="center">
<tr>
<td>Length of a tiny ant</td>
<td>1.4 millimetres</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Height of a short person</td>
<td>1.4 metres</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Length of the Auckland Harbor Bridge</td>
<td>1,020 metres</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Length of New Zealand</td>
<td>1,600 kilometres</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Diameter of the Sun</td>
<td>1,390,000 km</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>This infographic is licensed by Julian Carver under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nz/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand License</a>.</p>