The RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch has been going since 1979, providing ecologists with a vast set of data about British wildlife (7 million birds were counted in 2014 alone).
The importance of organising this vast set of data to make it easier to find any particular piece of information was recognised several decades ago, before the Internet era, when the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) [1, 2], the Inorganic Chemistry Structural Database (ICSD) [3] and CRYSMET [4] were created.
Modern analytical techniques – particularly the capability to analyse and compare vast sets of data simultaneously – are delivering new capabilities to understand how natural systems work.
(After 9/11, DARPA also gave birth to Total Information Awareness, a program designed to sort through vast sets of data about individuals, including Americans, in order to identify potential terrorists. Congress killed the program in 2003, but many of its capabilities were passed along to other departments).
The study of the human brain is informing advanced artificial intelligence algorithms that can manipulate vast sets of data.
The ability to quickly extract actionable insights from vast sets of data has already become a business imperative in some sectors.
The computer has added enormously to the power that the amateur can bring to bear on a problem, but interestingly Dr Lintott argues, it is the human brain's unique ability to spot inconsistencies in the vast sets of data scientists have amassed that makes citizen science so useful.
And in some cases I think we've got a lot of knowledge to share: experiences in social media and engagement might be a good example, as might the wealth of insight we gain for our vast set of audience data, survey responses, and user-testing.
The proposed kinetic model is based on the syngas oxidation mechanism previously developed by authors, which was thoroughly tested against a vast set of experimental data, and incorporates recent ab initio studies of elementary processes with singlet oxygen molecules.
It is "big data," the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world.
The availability of vast sets of behavior data based on individual web queries using the search engines offered by companies like Google and Microsoft has for a number of years been seen as a potential indicator of health-related information.
