Designing a Computer System to Support an Electronic Scientific Community

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Professor Schatz is undertaking a one-year investigation to understand and outline the design of a computer system to support an electronic scientific community. While later proposals will be submitted to support the system, this project is to lay the necessary groundwork to enable the implementation to proceed as planned. When implemented, this system should be a new form of biological instrumentation which can effectively manipulate scientific databases. Appropriate community knowledge will be identified to be collected into a digital library and the design will incorporate the systems technology necessary to manipulate this library over nationwide networks. The community chosen is the group of scientists studying the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a major model organism in molecular biology. The "worm community" consists of some 500 members worldwide, with an unusual degree of open communication and sharing of unpublished information. The community knowledge includes formal data, such as published literature and experimental results, and informal data, such as newsletters and experimental methods. The designed system will capture a significant portion of this knowledge in electronic form and encode it into a "worm information space" which can be transparently browsed by scientists anywhere on nationwide scientific networks. Preparation of the system design requires understanding user needs and available technology. this will be accomplished by working with researchers who will be the system's initial users and who are experts on the available data and technology. Such investigation should enable the design to ensure that the system will contribute to making valuable scientific discoveries.