Big data availability and full exploitation. A "wide screen" overview on potential opportunities and current criticalities

In recent years a significant effort has been put in fostering the sharing of research data as a mean for increasing the efficacy and efficiency of research funding. This has been favored by several concurrent and mutually influencing factors, which can be mainly classified as social, political and technological. The collaborative approach, which is common in many scientific fields, has now become a widespread paradigm in many human activities, thanks to the internet technologies, which favor the "social" approach to problem solving. As a consequence, national governments and supernational organizations are devising laws, rules, guidelines and funding instruments in order to provide a framework for an effective sharing of research data (open formats, open licenses, etc.). On the technological side, the availability of broadband connections and the emerging paradigms of big data and cloud computing lay the physical foundations for research data openness. Nevertheless, there are still some issues, which prevent the full exploitation of the open data potential. Taken for granted the openness of formats and licenses, guarantees are needed as regards data and metadata quality and long term availability and readability. All this implies costs and an accurate planning. More subtle questions regard which data should be kept and made available (should we preserve only observation data or also experiment data?). On the other hand big data availability in open formats provides reuse opportunities to small organizations, which could not afford to produce them through experiments/observations, but does not solve the problems related to the large computing power needed to process them. The present paper aims at discussing all the above points and to provide a picture of the current state of the debate in Italy, in general, and at CNR, in particular, with references also to the international context.