Claudia Bauzer Medeiros: How can Geoinformatics help eScience research (and vice-versa)?

Modern science is interdisciplinary and data-intensive. In the past, the problem was how to obtain data. Today, the bottleneck is the need for new computational strategies and tools so that scientists can manage these massive volumes of heterogeneous, distributed, data, and generate new knowledge from the processing, analysis and visualization of the data.

eScience,  also called  data-driven science, is characterized by joint research in computer science in collaboration with scientists from other domains so they can obtain results faster, better or in a different way. eScience research is about big data -- and the design and development of algorithms, tools and techniques to support the whole research cycle, from capture, curation and mining of data to data visual representation and sharing.

Countless eScience initiatives depend on Geoinformatics – e.g., in studies concerning biodiversity, global warming, smart cities or archaeology. Nevertheless, many of these projects do not take full advantage of advances in the science of geodata management. By the same token, research efforts in Geoinformatics might profit from methodologies, algorithms and techniques developed in projects that have little to do with geographic issues  -- e.g., in eHealth (and studies that try to understand multi-scale interactions between genomics, proteomics and metabolomics). The talk will discuss the challenges of some of these initiatives, and how their solution requires extending the reach of Geoinformatics – thus advancing other sciences and Geoinformatics itself.

Website: www.ic.unicamp.br/~cmbm