SEEK: Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge
Beach, J., Gauch, S., Michener, W., Ludaescher, B., Rajasekar, A., Jones, M., Kennedy, J. and M. Schildhauer.
Institutions: University of Kansas, University of New Mexico, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Napier University, University of California at Santa Barbara.Understanding and sustaining the natural world in the 21st century depends on improving our capacity to access ecological, earth science, and human impact data; mining these data for new knowledge; leading to new insight and wisdom. The SEEK Project (Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge) is focused on building an internet technology framework with software tools that will be used to derive and extend ecological and biodiversity knowledge by facilitating the discovery, access, integration and analyses of distributed environmental data. SEEK will provide for the integration of local desktop web browsers with a semantic network of data and analytical tools, enabling researchers to explore complex environmental problems through web-based visual programming of analytical pipelines. This paper will provide an overview of the objectives of the five-year SEEK project with reference to the role of existing internet-based tools and components in the proposed architecture.