----- Original Message -----
From: "Jennifer McLennan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: maps-l
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 5:21 PM
Subject: Nature: Agencies join forces to share data


> From the March 22 issue of Nature. For the full text, see
> http://ealerts.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/hc530SpivX0HjB0BOpY0EA
>
> Excerpt:
>
> The US government is considering a massive
> plan to store almost all scientific data generated
> by federal agencies in publicly accessible
> digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of
> data access and sharing currently enjoyed by
> genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers
> via the National Virtual Observatory, but
> for the whole of US science.
> Scientists would then be able to access data
> from any federal agency and integrate it into
> their studies. For example, a researcher browsing
> an online journal article on the spread of a
> disease could not only pull up the underlying
> data, but mesh them with information from
> databases on agricultural land use, weather and
> genetic sequences.
> Nature has learned that a draft strategic
> plan will be drawn up by next autumn by a
> new Interagency Working Group on Digital
> Data (IWGDD). It represents 22 agencies,
> including the National Science Foundation
> (NSF), NASA, the Departments of Energy,
> Agriculture, and Health and Human Services,
> and other government branches including the
> Office of Science and Technology Policy.
> The group’s first step is to set up a robust
> public infrastructure so all researchers have
> a permanent home for their data. One option
> is to create a national network of online data
> repositories, funded by the government and
> staffed by dedicated computing and archiving
> professionals. It would extend to all communities
> a model similar to the Arabidopsis
> Information Resource, in which
> 20 staff serve 13,000 registered
> users and 5,000 labs.
>
> --
> Jennifer McLennan
> Director of Communications
> SPARC
> (202) 296-2296 ext. 121
> (202) 872-0884 Fax
> http://www.arl.org/sparc
>