A fundraiser held by Tom Pritzker this weekend in Chicago was part of a plan to make Chicago a center for big data:

University of Chicago computer scientist Ian Foster pressed the clicker and up popped a map of the most sophisticated fiber-optic networks in the world.

On that map, at least, Chicago appeared to be the center of everything, a crossroads of information dwarfing Beijing, London and New York in importance.

Fiber-optic lines lace this city — because they are often laid along railroad lines. And the University of Chicago is working to use that geographic advantage to build the largest storage hub in the world for genetic and medical information, called the bionimbus cloud. The goal is to harness massive amounts of data and computing power to solve the riddle of diseases such as cancer.

Last week, Hyatt Hotels Corp. Chairman Tom Pritzker and his wife, Margot, hosted a fundraiser at the Park Hyatt Chicago to introduce the project to about 50 friends, including CDW Corp. founder Michael Krasny; Melvin and Ellen Gordon, the CEO and president of Tootsie Roll Industries, respectively; Crate and Barrel founders Carole and Gordon Segal; Wheels Inc. Chief Executive Jim Frank; and Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago…

Grasping the magnitude of the data the medical community needs to collect and analyze is almost impossible.

But understanding a railroad hub — and the transport of grain, meat or oil — is not.

“Business, innovation, discovery, jobs still depend on taking raw materials and turning them into refined products,” Foster said. “Often, nowadays, the raw material is data and the refined material is knowledge.”

This is an interesting comparison to make in Chicago, a city that heavily depends on its transportation facilities such as busy airports and the large percentage of US rail traffic that goes through the region and has served as a commodity trading center for decades. So why not data analysis and infrastructure? At the same time, I’m guessing Chicago has a ways to go compared to other tech and data centers like Silicon Valley and Seattle, let alone other places like Austin and Boston.