NSF Young Investigator

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Science information systems is the construction and study of complete computer systems to support scientific research. This project is building a model "electronic community system", a digital library containing all the knowledge of a community of molecular biologists and a software environment to manipulate this library across the NSFNET, with the first release currently running in 20 biology laboratories. Several studies are being pursued in collaboration to investigate technology and sociology issues in constructing electronic communities. An "information space" is the representation used to support uniform transparent retrieval from many distributed data sources; it consists of uniform objects which package items from the sources and interconnect them to form a relationship graph. There are data model issues in providing uniformity across multiple data types and network caching issues in providing transparency of interaction across wide-area networks. There are also information retrieval issues in supporting semantic-based retrieval from an automatically generated representation which includes a domain-specific thesaurus. Finally, there are sociological issues in how the communication patterns of the community change with significant electronic support.