Working With Data on the Web

Discussion

Interactive web applications have transformed science (and the rest of society), but they are not the only way to do useful things. This lesson shows that constructing and publishing static data sets is just as useful, particularly if an index for those data sets is also constructed in order to make the data findable.

The other key part of this lesson is that any program that’s going to be used repeatedly should handle common errors. Networks can fail, servers can go down or become congested: while making every single utility program fault-tolerance isn’t cost-effective, having them detect and report problems can remove a lot of friction from the process of discovery.