Context
After completing my Master’s degree, I had the opportunity to contribute to the development of ORBS – the Marine Biodiversity Observatory, a project carried out for the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and the Sicilian Regional Government.
Its goal was to collect, organize, and preserve scientific data on marine biodiversity.
The ambition was considerable.
To build a system capable of preserving not only recent observations, but also decades of knowledge scattered throughout the scientific literature.
Dozens of researchers and research fellows worked on extracting information from publications spanning more than fifty years.
Every record was georeferenced, linked to its original source, and accompanied by an assessment of its quality and reliability.
That was when I realized that data, on its own, says very little.
Knowing what was observed is important.
But knowing who observed it, when, where, how, and how much we can trust it is what truly makes the information meaningful.
Context isn’t additional information.
It’s part of the information itself.
Since then, whenever I design a system, I try to preserve not only the data, but also the relationships that explain its origin, quality, and meaning.
Because I believe an archive stores information.
A good system also preserves the reasons why that information can be trusted.
The tools have changed.
That idea hasn’t.
Data is valuable. Context makes it trustworthy.