ABSTRACT
The natural sciences encompass a broad cross-section of disciplines including all of biology, agriculture, physical and earth sciences, and even aspects of medicine. In this chapter we concentrate primarily on the life sciences to explore technology’s impact on information management. Every natural science subdiscipline embraces some aspect of the burgeoning development of computer-based tools for managing information in its myriad forms-text, images, and numeric or other types of raw data. Scientific researchers tend to develop expertise
in narrow areas within their discipline, and this specialization carries over into the way they view computing. Most computer applications in natural sciences have sophisticated technical features tailored to serve specialized areas of inquiry. Despite this specialization, the availability of the World WideWeb fosters trends to make many types of data more broadly accessible. Easy access to a variety of data sources can assist scientists in noticing patterns, and they may devise interesting research problems as a result of relationships they discover among data from varied investigations.
