Contributing to a Vision for Cross-Disciplinary Informatics

As the problems humanity faces become ever more obvious and dangerous, the need for interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research and solutions becomes ever more apparent. The problems themselves are often intertwined in complex ways - for example the impact of climate change on human health, food & water security, disasters, and so on and how all of these are exacerbated by human population growth and a general lack of recognition that humanity is part of the ecosystem upon which Earthly life depends. Underpinning our ability to understand and solve these complex problems are data of all kinds, more importantly the information that has and continues to be garnered through obtaining and analyzing these and most importantly their inclusion in the larger body of knowledge and ways of knowing that hopefully leads to the wisdom needed to directly address the root causes of each problem. Over the past decades, through involvement in projects on science topics as diverse as quasars and stellar pediatrics, solar physics, social science, and a wide variety of Earth Science topics; where informatics topics such as data management and curation, systems and framework development; and tools and methodologies such as Use Cases, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, Knowledge Graphs, Information Models, etc. were included; a number of principles and lessons learned which unite the technical underpinnings of these projects have come to the fore. These will be discussed in this presentation.