Digital Science
Digital Technologies are Leading to Disruptive Change in Our World
With the ever-increasing and rapid development of digital technologies, our society is undergoing a fundamental and disruptive changes in all areas of life, which is commonly referred to succinctly as digital transformation. Nothing remains as it was in times without computers, pre-Internet and WWW, before WLAN, smartphones and the cloud. The way people live together, the way they think, do business and act in society has been affected and is changing at an unimaginable speed, without no clear indication of where this development will lead.
The Necessary Scientific Support for the Digital Transformation
Bringing light and understanding to the processes of this development is a major challenge for science. However, traditional disciplines are not in a position to even begin to address and master these challenges. This begins with the absence of concepts whith which to name and describe these new phenomena of the three-dimensional physical world, which is constantly expanding to incorporate new virtual dimensions in order to make them accessible for investigation in the first place. While the theoretical understanding of time underwent a fundamental change at the end of the pre-digital age with the concept of the space-time, digital technologies now anable us to work and act at the speed of light and over any distance via virtual channels. Although computer science can develop increasingly powerful and astonishing information-processing machines and devices and describe the technical processes and sequences within them, it remains silent on the interactions of these technologies with all the other entities and phenomena of our physical world.
Digital Science
New scientific disciplines are emerging under the term 'digital science', with their own tools, theories and methods for investigating expanded objects of study that include new virtual dimensions and references. Digital science encompasses all scientific disciplines involved in the digital transformation of the real world, reflecting, analysing, substantiating and promoting these processes scientifically.
Digital Science provides a holistic analysis of how the digital transformation, driven by innovative information and communication technologies (ICT) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, is qualitatively and quantitatively changing the real world in technical, social, economic, and political terms. The company also researches existing approaches to the ethical and legal assessment of digitisation processes, examining them for compliance with the principles of freedom, equality, tolerance, the rule of law, and sustainability.
Digital science is an interdisciplinary field of research encompassing the systematic application of computer-aided methods and digital resources across various scientific disciplines. Combining elements from computer science, data science, and traditional research areas, it seeks to provide new insights and solve complex problems.
Digital science encompasses individual disciplines from all scientific fields
Digital science describes an interdisciplinary field that encompasses many and very different individual scientific disciplines that are based on the systematic application of digital methods and digital resources or deal with different aspects of digitization. These disciplines come from all subject areas:
In Summary, Digital Science Can be Characterized as Follows:
- Digital science describes an interdisciplinary field that encompasses many and very different individual scientific disciplines that are based on the systematic application of digital methods and digital resources or deal with different aspects of digitization
- Researchers in the field of Digital Science use a variety of digital tools and technologies for data collection, analysis and visualization.
- Large amounts of data are collected and then analyzed to identify patterns and gain new insights.
- Digital Science combines methods and concepts from various subject areas, such as mathematics, computer science and statistics with the specific specialist knowledge of the other disciplines. This enables new research methods and questions that would not be possible to ask and answer within traditional approaches.