Data Science: Future possibilities

Richer machine-readable descriptions may reduce repeated discovery and interpretation work across research projects. Benefits depend on communities maintaining identifiers, vocabularies and access conditions. Metadata can support a reproducible workflow, but cannot replace the underlying measurements or methodological judgment.

Future infrastructure could make it easier to connect observations, models and uncertainty across disciplines. LIGO illustrates what coordinated measurement and analysis can achieve, but transferring that success to other domains requires their own instruments, assumptions and validation. Cross-domain automatic discovery remains a possibility, not a demonstrated general capability.