Embedding Data within Knowledge Spaces.

Joe Futrelle, Jeff Gaynor, Joel Plutchak, Peter Bajcsy, Jason Kastner, Kailash Kotwani, Jong Sung Lee, Luigi Marini, Robert E. McGrath, Terry McLaren, Yong Liu, and James Myers

2008 NCSA Private Sector (PSP) Annual Meeting, May 12-14, NCSA, Illinois (2008)

Data management is becoming increasingly complex as new sensors and models drive growth in data volumes, as interdisciplinary studies and systems-level modeling drive the need for synthesizing heterogeneous data, and as reliance on digital information as primary records drives a need for cost-effective curation and preservation. As part of NCSA's broad efforts in these areas, the Cyberenvironments Directorate has been developing cyberinfrastructure necessary to support powerful "knowledge spaces" built upon concepts of content management, the semantic Web, active curation, and computational inference capabilities.

This poster outlines the core open source infrastructure that has been developed (Tupelo) as well as work to standardize descriptions of data provenance (the Open Provenance Model), file formats (the Data Format Description Language), and basic geospatial and temporal data relationships. Companion posters on Cyberenvironments and Digital Observatories highlight how this type of infrastructure is enabling data synthesis and modeling across a wide range of projects.