SLIS Faculty News

IU Associate Dean of Library Technologies Robert McDonald, left, School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) professor Katy Borner and SLIS assistant professor Ying Ding have received $1.8 million from the National Institutes of Health to help develop a "Facebook for scientists." Photo Courtesy of Indiana University.

A network visualization of the "Facebook for scientists" project, above, displays how universities using the proposed VIVOweb would network with existing databases like the gene ontology information center GO and UniProt, and protein knowledge database, and its non-redundant archive, UniParc. Photo Courtesy of Indiana University.

SLIS faculty members Katy Börner and Ying Ding were featured in a press release from the Indiana University News Room for their participation in a National Institutes of Health research collaboration. The subtitle of the article is "IU information scientists receive $1.8 million in ARRA funding." The release and story photographs are reposted here with permission.

Facebook for scientists: Map your expertise

IU information scientists receive $1.8 million in ARRA funding

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 26, 2009

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Indiana University has received more than $1.8 million from the National Institutes of Health to collaborate on a $12.2 million, seven-university project designed to network researchers around the country.

While the proposed new networking system will contain authentication mechanisms to protect sensitive data and intellectual property, it is being described as a Facebook for scientists.

IU's portion of the project is led by Katy Börner, Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science and director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at IU. Co-investigators with Börner at IU are Ying Ding, an assistant professor of Information Science, and Robert McDonald, associate dean for library technologies at IU and associate director for the Data to Insight Center at the Pervasive Technology Institute.

Börner's team at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center will conduct research and development on data analysis and visualization, Ding will be responsible for ontology development and McDonald will be responsible for implementation at IU of VIVO, a networking template currently in place at Cornell University that brings together publicly available information on the people, departments, graduate fields, facilities and other resources that collectively make up the research and scholarship environment in all disciplines at Cornell.

Ding explained that ontology is a formally represented community consensus that enables data integration into a form that allows for machine involvement for information understanding and processing.

"One of the major VIVO ontologies models the scholarly activities of research communities, where paper, grant, teaching, research interest, organization and event are interlinked and formally represented," she said. "This could gather all the related information for one researcher into one place and further links to any other related semantic datasets. Linking and formal representation generate great power to realize more intelligent knowledge discovery."

Posted Oct. 29, 2009