We call it phenomenology. The very base of any proper science. The rest is just a mechanical work of eliminating the noise from this data.
Science should never produce any knowledge which is not found in the original data (either passive observations or controlled experiments - does not really matter). The scientific method is all about techniques of extracting the most compact representation (i.e., the information) hidden inside this massive data sets. It turns out that the axiomatic theories are very common and compact representations for many areas of science, but not necessarily the universal representation.
What you disregard as 'just a mechanical work' is nothing of the sort. It has required all the ingenuity of the greatest genius in history to get modern science out of the data, and any future advances will require even greater insights.
If anything, the data gathering is the 'mechanical work' part of science.
Being "mechanical" does not mean anything "easy". It's hard, nearly impossible, simply because the most formal definition of this process boils down to an exhaustive search in a huge (but finite) morphological box. That's why we need the greatest minds that are able to find suitable search heuristics.
But yet, this process does not produce any new knowledge on its own. All the knowledge is there, in the data. Waiting to be extracted.
No, this is not a new knowledge, and not a new information (as defined by the algorithmic information theory), it's a non-falsifiable piece of, well, probably art. For this very reason mathematics is not considered a science.
We call it phenomenology. The very base of any proper science. The rest is just a mechanical work of eliminating the noise from this data.
Science should never produce any knowledge which is not found in the original data (either passive observations or controlled experiments - does not really matter). The scientific method is all about techniques of extracting the most compact representation (i.e., the information) hidden inside this massive data sets. It turns out that the axiomatic theories are very common and compact representations for many areas of science, but not necessarily the universal representation.