Global effort will catalogue information languishing in drawers and basements.

Over the last decade the digital age has seen an explosion in the rate of data creation. Estimates from 2009 suggest that over 100 GB of data has already been created for every single individual on the planet ranging from holiday snaps to health records-that's over 1 trillion CDs worth of data, equivalent to 24 tons of books per person!

Scientists seeking funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will soon need to spell out how they plan to manage the data they hope to collect. It's part of a broader move by NSF and other federal agencies to emphasize the importance of community access to data.

he Open Science Data Initiative is an initiative led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in partnership with Microsoft's Public Sector Developer Evangelism team. OSDI is based on OGDI which in turn uses the Azure Services Platform to make it easier to publish and use a wide variety of scientific data from government agencies. OSDI is an sample of OGDI's open source 'starter kit' (coming soon) with code that can be used to publish data on the Internet in a Web-friendly format with easy-to-use, open API's. OSDI-based web API's can be accessed from a variety of client technologies such as Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, mapping web sites, etc. Whether you are a researcher wishing to use scientific data, a hobyist developer, or a "budding scientist", these open API's will enable you to build innovative applications, visualizations and mash-ups that empower people through access to scientific information. This site is built using the OGDI starter kit software assets and provides interactive access to some publicly-available data sets along with sample code and resources for writing applications using the OSDI APIs.

At first glance, going "open" would seem like a serious career risk -- years of work could be for nothing if a competitor uses your work to beat you to publication -- but many practitioners of openness say the benefits outweigh those risks

A bold project hopes that getting scientists to share information can deepen their understanding of diseases

National Science Foundation (NSF) is finding ways to make its work more accessible to the general public. 

6-min Video of open data examples at TED conference