ITR/IM: A National Earth Science Knowledge Node for Research and Education

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

0112655 Seber As part of this Information Technology Research project, the PIs will design and develop a US Earth Science Knowledge Node that is composed of diversified, regional scale, reviewed, high quality earth science data sets, and related web-accessible information retrieval and knowledge extraction tools. This system will assist (1) earth scientists in their research, (2) educators in their classrooms and curriculum development, (3) students in their learning and self discovery process, (4) the public at large in their curiosity driven life-long learning efforts related to earth science phenomena that affect their daily lives, and (5) decision makers in their case evaluations and assessments. The organized knowledge node will grow to become a persistent node to larger scale, information technology driven research efforts undertaken to build distributed, interoperable, multidisciplinary data and information networking by various groups, such as the NSF's National Science Digital Library (NSDL), Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), the earth science research initiative of Geoinformatics, and the broader efforts of building a Digital Earth. Data and information management has always been a major obstacle in sharing and accessing data. High quality, organized, and ready-to-be-used data sets in the planned knowledge node will eliminate problems and help researchers save time and to effectively communicate generated and available knowledge. However, the maximum benefit of this knowledge system will come from its ability to enable multidisciplinary earth science research by providing data sets and data manipulation/analysis tools that will be used to understand complex earth system dynamics. The repository will include data sets from those researchers who do not wish to manage their data for longer terms. In addition, the PIs will develop a web-based mapping and analysis interface that will allow seamless access to data sets of interest and help users retrieve information fast and efficiently. ***