There's an interesting report available for downloading from the Aspen Institute titled "The Promise and Peril of Big Data", summarizing a workshop the Institute held in 2009. This can be found at

http://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/promise-peril-big-data

This report explores some of the same issues discussed in Microsoft's recent book "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery" which I posted about earlier, and which can be found at

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/

but at a less technical level, and also looks more broadly at implications beyond the sciences.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI