CIF21 DIBBs: Brown Dog

在信息时代，任何人创造并分享大量的数字数据都变得微不足道。这包括由图像、视频和音频等数据组成的非结构化集合，以及由文档和电子表格等数据组成的原生数字内容集合。虽然内容的创造和分享变得很容易，但它的对立面，即搜索和使用数字数据内容的能力，却变得极其困难。在物理模拟中，图书馆员使用策展的过程来标准化信息存储的格式，并勤奋地用元数据索引馆藏，以便当前和未来的人都能找到信息。在数字领域，这种情况不会发生，因为管理开销是创建更多数据的一个不受欢迎的瓶颈。尽管诸如现代搜索引擎之类的流行服务给人一种正在这样做的错觉，但这在很大程度上是基于文本和/或包含文本元数据的数字数据部分。然而，隐藏在难以读取的文件格式背后的非结构化集合和内容构成了我们集体数字数据资产的重要组成部分，并且在很大程度上是不可访问的。今天的科学不仅使用而且依赖于软件和数字内容。众所周知，科学不仅对我们所拥有的大量数字数据负责，而且其中大部分是未经整理的数据，科学界目前将其称为“长尾”数据。因此，依赖于数字数据和软件的当代科学，软件随着基础技术的变化而迅速发展和消失，正在进入一个科学结果不再容易重复的领域，因此本质上不再是一门科学，因为科学依赖于一个记录在案的过程每次都会产生相同的结果。

The information age has made it trivial for anyone to create and then share vast amounts of digital data. This includes unstructured collections made of data such as images, video, and audio to collections of born digital content made up of data such as documents and spreadsheets. While the creation and sharing of content has been made easy, its inverse, the ability to search and use the contents of digital data, has been made exponentially more difficult. In the physical analogue librarians have used the process of curation to standardize the format by which information is stored and diligently index holdings with metadata to allow both current and future generations to find information. Digitally this does not happen as that curation overhead is an unwelcomed bottleneck to the creation of more data. Though popular services such as modern search engines give the illusion that this is being done, this is largely over the portion of digital data that is text based and/or containing text metadata. Unstructured collections and contents trapped behind difficult to read file formats, however, make up a significant part of our collective digital data assets and are largely not accessible. Science today not only uses but relies on software and digital content. It is well known that science is not only responsible for a significant amount of our digital data holdings but that also much of this is un-curated data, what the scientific community currently refer to as "long-tail" data. As such contemporary science, which relies on digital data and software, software which evolves and disappears quickly as underlying technology changes, is entering a realm where scientific results are no-longer easily reproducible and as such in essence no longer a science as science hinges on the fact that a documented procedure will result in the same result each time.