dat
is an incredibly powerful technology for peer to peer sharing of versioned, secure, integrity-guaranteed data.
One thing it excels at is populating a live feed of data points from one source, and allowing any number of peers to subscribe to that feed. The data can only originate from the original source (this is guaranteed using public-key encryption), but the peers in the network can still sync the new data with one another. To subscribe to a given source you only need to know an alphanumeric key that uniquely identifies the source, and is automatically generated by dat.
There are many ways that this simple system can be used to build a new infrastructure for science. This is the first in a series of posts in which I'll explain how.
Here I briefly describe some ways dat
can be used to automate some aspects of scientific discovery, increase resource and information reuse efficiency, and help keep our information resources up to date with science (a topic I will expand on signif