ACADEMIA

NCSA's Digital Library Technologies group, led by Joe Futrelle, develops tools and techniques to manage semantic content for scientific applications. This ranges from digital library technology for managing scientific data to semantic Web technology for integrating distributed, heterogeneous metadata while maintaining its semantic integrity. The group's primary project is the Tupelo Semantic Content Repository, which provides tools for managing data across distributed heterogeneous semantic storage technologies such as RDF triple stores and content management systems. "Semantic content management is a big part of the cyberenvironments story," Futrelle says. "Generic tools and techniques that we're developing can enable data management infrastructure to be more easily extended to support specialized use cases without requiring extensive domain-specific development. Semantic Web technologies lend themselves to loosely coupled environments like science cyberenvironments, where centralization of data resources is impractical." Futrelle says his group, which also includes Joel Plutchak and Jeff Gaynor, acts in "almost a consulting role" to a range of NCSA projects and collaborators, assisting them with issues of integrating heterogeneous data and moving from "data stovepipes" to more flexible, loosely coupled strategies. DLT collaborators include NCSA's Automated Learning Group, which is also using semantic Web technologies; the TRECC visualization group, which is involved with developing interfaces to semantic content repositories for ECID; Tom Habing, a research programmer at Grainger Engineering Library, and other Grainger staff involved with the ECHO-DEP project; and several researchers from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, including Janet Eke, David Dubin, and J. Stephen Downie. "Our group is developing generic solutions for content management that are oriented around maintaining and preserving semantics using some of the latest semantic Web technologies," Futrelle says. "These technologies provide some real advantages over content management systems and relational databases. If you're interested in learning more about them, we can help." For more information on the Digital Library Technologies group, go to its Web site or contact Joe Futrelle (futrelle@ncsa.uiuc.edu or 217-265-0296).