On the Challenges of Collaborative Data Processing

The last 30 years have seen the creation of a variety of electronic collaboration tools for science and business. Some of the best-known collaboration tools support text editing (e.g., wikis). Wikipedia's success shows that large-scale collaboration can produce highly valuable content. Meanwhile much structured data is being collected and made publicly available. We have never had access to more powerful databases and statistical packages. Is large-scale collaborative data analysis now possible? Using a quantitative analysis of Web 2.0 data visualization sites, we find evidence that at least moderate open collaboration occurs. We then explore some of the limiting factors of collaboration over data.