The Era of Big Data Comes to Oceanography

Abstract

The late Jim Gray, who received the prestigious Turing Award in computer science and was a pioneer in the development of relational databases, proposed the "Fourth Paradigm" to describe the field of data-intensive science (Hey et al., 2009). In Jim's presentation to the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board in 2007, he described the first three paradigms as empirical (relying on observations of nature), theoretical (relying on models), and computational (relying on computer simulations). The fourth paradigm was data exploration, which, in his view, combined theory, experiment, and simulation. Moreover, it relied on computational tools and processes to explore massive and diverse data sets.

Keywords

• big data
• oceanography data