[BOAI] UC News: DataONE to deal with data deluge

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from the U of California.  --Peter Suber.]


To view online: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/22398

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Contact: Patricia Cruse
Phone:  510-987-9016
Email:  patricia.cruse at ucop.edu

DataONE to deal with data deluge

Researchers at the University of California have partnered with dozens of
other universities and agencies to create DataONE (http://dataone.org), a
global data access and preservation network for earth and environmental
scientists that will support breakthroughs in environmental research.
DataONE (Data Observation Network for Earth) is one of two $20 million
awards made this year as part of the National Science Foundation's (NSF)
DataNet program. The collaboration of universities and government agencies
coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast
amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often incompatible
scientific data.  Resulting studies will range from research that
illuminates fundamental environmental processes to identifying environmental
problems and potential solutions.

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC
Santa Barbara, the Department of Computer Science and Genome Center at UC
Davis, and the California Digital Library at the UC Office of the President
are integrally involved in the NSF DataONE initiative.  Across these UC
partners, the several million dollar award will drive advanced research and
data acquisition, storage, mining, integration, and visualization for
DataONE. The resulting computing and processing “cyberinfrastructure” will
be made permanently available for use by the broader UC community and
international science communities. DataONE is led by the University of New
Mexico, and includes additional partner organizations across the United
States as well as from Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia.

“Scientists have spent hundreds of years collecting environmental data –
measuring temperature, counting fish and butterflies,” says Stephanie
Hampton, Deputy Director of NCEAS. “We already know quite a lot, when you
estimate the volume of scientific data that must exist out there, but the
challenge is to find those data sets and then put them together in a manner
that helps to address the important questions for science and society.
DataONE will be that portal for environmental data.”

The DataONE team will study how a vast digital data network can provide
secure and permanent access into the future, and also encourage scientists
to share their data. The team will help determine data and data citation
standards, as well as create the tools for organizing, managing, and
publishing data.

As one of five DataNet collaborations envisioned by the NSF (
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.htm), DataONE will build a
set of geographically distributed Coordinating Nodes that play an important
role in facilitating all of the activities of the global network.  The
initial three Coordinating Nodes will be at UC Santa Barbara (housed at the
Davidson Library), at the University of New Mexico, and at the University of
Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"Institutions have made extensive investments in infrastructure for managing
data at their local institutions and in discipline-specific consortia, but
these systems generally don't interoperate," says Matthew Jones, Director of
Informatics Research and Development at NCEAS. "DataONE will provide a
critically needed interoperability layer that will allow scientists from
diverse domains to collaborate on pressing environmental science
challenges."

Scientific data integration and management also occupies computer science
researchers who develop methods and tools that support all stages of the
data life cycle. “Effective annotation and integration of data, and
efficient management of data lineage information are hot research topics in
the database and scientific workflows communities,” says Bertram Ludaescher,
professor of computer science at UC Davis, whose team specializes in
scientific workflow and data integration technologies, and storage and
querying of data provenance.

Libraries have traditionally played a critical role in preserving and
providing access to scholarly materials and recently have begun to focus on
the complex challenges associated with managing scientific data.  “Libraries
don't have the capacity to address these challenges individually.  We need
to partner with researchers, information technologists, and domain
specialists to address these complex problems” says Patricia Cruse, Director
of the UC Curation Center at the California Digital Library.

DataONE includes experts from library, computer, and environmental sciences
explicitly to bridge these worlds and to develop an infrastructure to serve
science for many decades to come.

About the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

NCEAS was established in 1995. The organization has hosted more than 4,000
scientists from over 50 countries, and supported more than 430 collaborative
projects in ecology and related fields. NCEAS scientists develop new
techniques in informatics, and apply general knowledge of ecological systems
to specific issues, such as the loss of biotic diversity, global change, and
sustainability of marine ecosystems. NCEAS is among the top 1 percent of
38,000 institutions evaluated for scientific impact in environmental
research. NCEAS is funded by the National Science Foundation, the state of
California, the University of California and numerous other donors.  For
further information contact Stephanie Hampton, Deputy Director, NCEAS, at
hampton at nceas.ucsb.edu or (805) 892-2505 or Matt Jones, Director of
Informatics Research and Development, NCEAS at jones at nceas.ucsb.edu.

About the UC Curation Center and the California Digital Library

The UC Curation Center (UC3) of the California Digital Library (CDL) was
established in 2009.  UC3 is a central preservation and curation service
provider addressing the system-wide needs of the 10 campuses of the
University of California, one of the pre-eminent public universities of the
world.  The California Digital Library provides digital library development
and support for the University of California libraries and the communities
they serve.  For further information contact Patricia Cruse, Director, UC
Curation Center, at patricia.cruse at ucop.edu or 510/987-9016.

About Professor Ludaescher

Bertram Ludaescher is professor at the Department of Computer Science and a
member of the Genome Center, both at UC Davis. Work in his Data & Knowledge
Systems (DAKS) lab is focused on scientific workflow design and
optimization, data provenance, knowledge representation, and data
integration. He is  involved in several collaborative R&D projects,
including the DOE Scientific Data Management Center project (SciDAC/SDM) and
NSF projects to develop workflow technology (Kepler-CORE) and
cyberinfrastructure for bioinformatics and environmental observatory
applications.  Prof. Ludaescher received his M.S. in Computer Science from
the University of Karlsruhe and his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg,
Germany. Until 2004 he was a research scientist at the San Diego
Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty at the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering at UCSD.  He can be contacted at
ludaesch at ucdavis.edu.
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