News

posted on 04 June 2008 13:44

In yet another addition to the world's digital information, a University of California, San Diego, research study aims to quantify the amounts and kinds of information being produced worldwide by businesses and consumers. It will act as an academic comparison to the two IDC/EMC exploding digital universe papers.

The “How Much Information?” study will be completed by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university faculty team and undertaken at the Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS), with support from the Jacobs School of Engineering and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

IR/PS Dean Peter F. Cowhey said: “Experts say that we live in an information economy, but how much information is there, and do countries count and value information comparably? The previous generation of studies have reported information as countable bits and bytes, and documented large growth numbers. The next generation of studies will count more precisely the impacts and implications of information growth, and do this internationally.”

Not EMC
The How Much Information (HMI) program is a three-year effort by specialists at University of California, San Diego, MIT and University of California, Berkeley.   Previous theorists involved in developing baseline data are UC Berkeley professors Hal Varian and Peter Lyman, highly regarded for work in this field. Professor Varian noted “we are very pleased that GIIC is undertaking this next generation of studies.”

Industry experts from AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, LSI, Oracle, Seagate Technology LLC, and PARC will work as part of the “How Much Information” team, representing the leading firms in the enterprise software, network and information storage industries.

Umm, the team includes experts from the 'leading firms in the ... information storage' industry and it doesn't include EMC. Some might think it's a pointed omission.

A study co-leader, Dr. James Short, noted that recent industry studies - surely a reference to the IDC papers - have reported larger and larger amounts of information being produced and stored in networks, companies and homes.

He said: “We will continue to document the growth in information but at the end of the day we are studying how information works. How information works is about measuring and counting the uses and applications driving the massive increases in networking and data growth, allowing businesses and consumers to use information more effectively to make better decisions.”

Updates on the research will be announced over the course of the next three years, with the initial report slated for publication at the end of 2008. For more information and to view updates on the research, please visit http://giic.ucsd.edu.

^{[Peter Roberts, news editor.]}

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