FOCAL (Federated Online Collaborative Analysis and Learning)

The effective acquisition and sharing of knowledge across the World Wide Web remains a formidable challenge for today¿s Internet user. Exacerbating this challenge is the need to integrate information across a wide array of disparate data types, ranging from textual documents, to 2D and 3D imagery, to geospatial data layers, to numerical datasets, and so on. Consequently, there is a pressing need for tools that can facilitate collaborative analysis and integration of the web¿s heterogeneous, asymmetric collection of information sources. This project builds upon and extends the highly successful and increasingly-pervasive ¿wiki¿ paradigm to provide a collaborative analysis and information sharing framework for complex datasets. The extended wiki framework will (1) be easy to access, understand, search and navigate, (2) be entirely open source, and (3) support collaborative publishing and analysis of datasets that span a wide array of complex data types. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: Potential applications include scientific collaboration, intelligence gathering, inter- and intra-agency information sharing, corporate-wide information repositories, public outreach, etc. Benefits should include enhanced opportunities for sharing and collaboration, integrated access to related datasets, rapid dissemination and integration of information, reduced duplication of effort, and a common knowledge base.