Environmental researchers who investigate climate change,
invasive species, infectious diseases, and other data-intensive topics can now
benefit from easy access to diverse data sets through technology released by
the Data Observation Network for Earth, or DataONE.
Understanding broad and complex environmental issues
increasingly relies on the discovery and analysis of massive data sets. But the
amount of collected data—from historical field notes to real-time satellite
data—means that researchers are now faced with an onslaught of options to
locate and integrate information relevant to the issue at hand.
DataONE, a ten-institution team including researchers from the U.S.
Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is addressing this data
dilemma with a one-stop search engine called ONEMercury that queries data
centers located around the world for relevant earth science information. ORNL’s
Robert Cook, John Cobb, Line Pouchard, and Giri Palanisamy are part of the
National Science Foundation-supported DataONE team that collaborated on the
newly released software, along with researchers from the University of
Tennessee’s School of Information Sciences in the College of Communication
& Information, the University of New Mexico, and other partners. At the
heart of the new software is an advanced search engine developed by Palanisamy
and colleagues at ORNL.
“This search system enables researchers to discover, access
and explore data that exist at many different repositories around the
Internet,” Cook said. “Previously there’s been no ‘federation’ of all
these different data centers that would allow someone to come in from one place
and search of all these resources.”
DataONE’s search tool enables researchers to easily integrate
previously incompatible data sets, as demonstrated by an ongoing project that
is already yielding results in the field of ecology. A DataONE working group
has combined a database of amateur bird sightings with environment data layers
about land use, weather, and vegetation to make refined predictions about bird
migration patterns.
“The whole process of making data available, and making the
data so it could be readily integrated, really benefited the bird
ecologists,” Cobb said. “That’s one example of how having data
available lets people look at new and important issues.”
The tool, which is freely available to the public, provides
access to data from sources such as the U.S. Geological Survey at ORNL, the
Ecological Society of America, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s
Distributed Active Archive Center at ORNL, the National Science Foundation’s
Long Term Ecological Research Network, South Africa National Parks, the
Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, and the Partnership for Interdisciplinary
Studies of Coastal Oceans, among others. DataONE partners expect more
organizations to join in the coming months.
DataONE is led by the University of New Mexico and includes
partner organizations across the United States, Europe, Africa, South America,
Asia, and Australia. In East Tennessee, others participating in DataONE are the
University of Tennessee, led by Bruce Wilson who has a joint UT-ORNL
appointment, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Core Science Analytics and
Synthesis program, led in Oak Ridge by Mike Frame.
One of the working groups involved in DataONE is the usability
and assessment group, led by Frame and by Carol Tenopir of the University of
Tennessee.
“We have the charge of making sure that the system and the
materials meet the needs of our stakeholders,” Tenopir said. “We
increase our engagement with the scientific community when we are able to teach
them the best ways of classifying and describing the data they collect.”
Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory