The Process of Analyzing Data is the Emergent Feature of Data Science

In recent years the term “data science” gained considerable attention worldwide. In a A Very Short History Of Data Science by Press (2013), the first appearance of the term is ascribed to Peter Naur in 1974 (Concise Survey of Computer Methods). Regardless who used the term first and in what context it has been used, we think that data science is a good term to indicate that data are the focus of scientific research. This is in analogy to computer science, where the first department of computer science in the USA had been established in 1962 at Purdue University, at a time when the first electronic computers became available and it was still not clear enough what computers can do, one created therefore a new field where the computer was the focus of the study. In this paper, we want to address a couple of questions in order to demystify the meaning and the goals of data science in general.