Abstract:Data driven scientific research has now gain great prosperity. However, we believe that the principle task of data science is to understand the basic problems within data research. In this paper, based on our experience in building the Data Science Institute in Imperial College London, we consider data science as the core of interdisciplinary research, and discuss the whole pipeline of data science research, including data integration and understanding, data sensing and interaction, data learning and cognition, and data exchange and economy. We discuss these basic scientific problems based on our practices in practice. We hope the work presented in this paper can bring thinking and discussion in a larger scale.