(Santa Barbara, Calif.) In response to the growing need for a way to easily access and analyze massive amounts of heterogeneous data in the fields of earth and environmental sciences, UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), a core partner in a joint effort to streamline such research, presents DataONE, the Data Observation Network for Earth. DataONE is capable of providing researchers access to globally distributed, networked data from a single point of discovery.
"People have been gathering and synthesizing ecological data for decades," said NCEAS Director of Informatics Research and Development and DataONE co-investigator Matthew Jones. Much of the problem an issue that NCEAS has been working to address since its inception in 1995 is the time and effort spent on locating, gathering, checking, and transforming data of interest for synthesis.
It's an effort that can take researchers nearly a year to complete, as they examine and analyze various forms of information, from remotely sensed data, to hundreds of published papers, to historic observational field data. Simultaneously, these researchers search remote repositories, check for duplicates, and integrate the information, as they try to find answers to complex problems that affect both science and society.
"Right now researchers have a hard time even finding the right data to answer complex environmental questions, and when they do, the work necessary to integrate really different types of data can be overwhelming," said NCEAS Deputy Director and DataONE co-investigator Stephanie Hampton. "DataONE provides the type of platform we need, to propel environmental science into the digital age."
DataONE, through the knowledge and infrastructure provided by library, computer, and environmental science experts, currently integrates information held by South Africa National Parks; the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity; the Ecological S
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| Contact: Sonia Fernandez sonia.fernandez@ia.ucsb.edu 805-893-4765 University of California - Santa Barbara Source:Eurekalert |