Collaborative Research: A Reaction Kinetics Database for Modeling Biogeochemical Systems

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Understanding how quickly environmental reactions take place is the goal of EarthKin, ageochemical database focusing on the rates of geochemical reactions. EarthKinscientists from University of Maine, Penn State, Columbia, and Saint Francis Universitywill compile existing reaction rates into a one-stop database that will allow access toresearchers working on a diverse range of projects ranging from removing carbondioxide from the atmosphere and permanently storing it beneath the ground to cleaningup contaminated environmental sites. When completed EarthKin will be available toscientists free via the web at www.earthchem.org. Not only will we compile existingdata, but we will also encourage new researchers to become involved by uploading theirnew results into the database.Recent advances in geoinformatics (the subdiscipline of developing technologicaland computation tools to facilitate information dissemination in the geosciences) havedrastically increased access that researchers have to geological information. Manyrecent endeavors have focused on online publishing of large data sets in order to makedata available to the wider community. EarthKin is especially interesting in that it is oneof the first attempts to include experimental data in a web-based data managementplatform. To do this, we will need to build new tools and data structures that will allowthe existing EarthChem platform to incorporate a new type of data.