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Education for all
The dawn of a new age is upon us, an information age, in which an ever-increasing and seemingly endless stream of new information is continuously generated. Information discovery and knowledge advancements occur at such rates that an ever-growing number of specialties is appearing, and in many fields it is impossible even for experts to
master everything there is to know. Anyone who has ever typed a query into an Internet search engine has been a firsthand witness to this information explosion. Even the most mundane terms will likely return hundreds, if not thousands, of hits. The sciences, especially in the areas of genomics and proteomics, are generating seemingly
insurmountable mounds of data.
Yet, one must also consider that this generated data, while not easily accessible to all, is often put to use, resulting in the creation of new ideas to generate even more knowledge or in the creation of more efficient means of data generation. Although the old adage “knowledge is power” holds true, and almost no one will deny that the knowledge gained has been beneficial, the sheer volume of information has created quite a quandary. Finding
information that is exactly relevant to your specific needs is often not a simple task. Take a minute to think about how many searches you performed in which all the hits returned were both useful and easily accessible (for example, were among the top matches, were valid links, and so on). More than likely, your search attempts did not run this
smoothly, and you needed to either modify your query or buckle down and begin to dig for the resources of interest.
Thus, one of the pressing questions of our time has been how do we deal with all of this data so we can efficiently find the information that is currently of interest to us? The most obvious answer to this question has been to use the power of computers to store these giant catalogs of information (for example, databases) and to facilitate searches
through this data. This line of reasoning has led to the birth of various fields of informatics (for example, bioinformatics, health informatics, business informatics, and so on). These fields are geared around the purpose of developing powerful methods for storing and retrieving data as well as analyzing it.