In the US, 2.5 petabytes of data are stored annually just for mammograms.

The volume of earth-observation data from the European Space Agency's satellites passed three petabytes in 2007. The projection for 2020? A seven-fold rise.

Knowledge Exchange's A Surfboard for Riding the Wave report calls for a collaborative data infrastructure to enable researchers to use, re-use and exploit research data to benefit scientific research, and society more generally.

"We have to do better at producing tools to support the whole research cycle-from data capture and data curation to data analysis and data visualization. Today, the tools for capturing data both at the mega-scale and at the milli-scale are just dreadful.