Development of an Automated Tool for Locating, Harvesting and Storing Experimental Scientific and Technical Data

Today, scientific and technical data are being generated at ever-increasing rates. At the same time, finding these data is becoming more difficult, as they are now often being deposited directly onto the Web without being linked to a specific publication. Even when a potential data source is located, present day search engines are not able to decode the content of the data source or to determine whether the data therein is useful for a given application. Users are then faced with going through hundreds, thousands, or many more potential data sources to find the few sources with data directly pertinent to their specific application. This project will develop an automated tool that will locate, transform, and place desired and relevant S and T data and metadata into a user-specified or community-of-interest-specified repository for further use. Phase I will develop a generic data model for S and T data using modern ontology methods. Then, the suitability of integrating that data model with harvesting and repository-creation methods ¿ in order to create a stand-alone, Web-based, software tool ¿ will be determined. In Phase II, the research results will be implemented to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed tool. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The DOE, as one of the largest S and T agencies in the federal government, performs research in virtually every area of science and engineering. Unfortunately the cost of locating, gathering, and storing complete sets of multi-disciplinary data often is a significant barrier to performing the research and development. The automated tool should reduce the cost of assembling previously generated data and avoid the need to regenerate it (because its existence was unknown, or it could not be located). In this way, the maximum amount of research and development resources could be focused on developing new knowledge, instead of on gathering what is already known. The tool also would support similar data gathering applications at other government agencies, universities, and businesses.