Harnessing the Flow of Data

All AI methods (machine assessed the health of and threats to Canada’s major watersheds: a learning, graph theory and artificial key finding was the poor state of data collection and organization neural networks) use relationships and amongst Canada’s water agencies, particularly for water quality and contextual data to model the world. [...] Following the 2008/2009 global recession, a confluence of small high-tech start-ups and the maturation of new technologies produced major changes in how large quantities of the world’s financial data are collected, managed and used. [...] As the cost of storage decreases and the speed of computing increases, the term “big data” has represented datasets just outside the reach of conventional management. [...] Envisioning a future of big data poised to manage human and natural systems—especially given the impacts of global economic and climate effects—it was a bold insight into the necessity and practicality of standardized environmental data and has since been partially adopted into a much larger network of Earth Observation satellites and improved geographic information systems. [...] Important milestones included the elimination of fees for public satellite observation data by the United States in 2008, development of peer- review scientific data repositories and funder mandates of opening datasets, and new commercial platforms for public data such as Amazon Web Services3 and Google Earth Engine.4 In addition to big data from the growing IoT, historical and archival data are b