Computer scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will work with STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, to enhance scientific research via the World Wide Web.
Government agencies around the world reportedly make billions of bits of raw data available to the public each day. However, this data is often in difficult formats or so widely spread around the Web that it is virtually unusable to the public and scientists who seek to use this valuable information in their research. Computer scientists within the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an application to help solve the problem. A collaboration with scientific publisher Elsevier, the application utilises the US government data warehouse, Data.gov, to provide scientists with easy and direct access to government data sets relevant to their research.
For Rensselaer, the work is the latest example of the Web Science research group's efforts to enhance the hundreds of thousands of raw government datasets available on the Data.gov website with advanced Semantic Web technology. Their work is bringing scientists and the public usable, relevant, searchable, and easy replicable datasets on topics from climate change to public safety to the federal deficit.
The new application, called US Government Dataset Search, lives on Elsevier's SciVerse websites. SciVerse provides the global scientific research community with searchable access to the world's largest source of peer-reviewed scientific content. Such access is seen as a vital component of the modern scientific process as scientists develop new discoveries by building off the findings of previous peer-reviewed publications.
Once selected from an application gallery by SciVerse users, the new application will display a customised list of government data sets most relevant to the topics for which the scientist is searching for articles. In addition to providing direct access to raw government datasets, the application simultaneously searches the Linking Open Government Data (LOGD) portal at Rensselaer's Tetherless World Research Constellation. The portal hosts Data.gov datasets that have been converted and enhanced with Semantic Web technologies. Semantic enhancements to the datasets make them much more usable and searchable to a variety of applications, enabling multiple data sets to be linked even when the underlying structure or format of each is different.
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