From the about section: Synthesizing data from the published literature is critical to addressing a wide range of questions, ranging from the history and future of global biodiversity to the evolution of continental crust. Doing so manually, however, can be prohibitively time consuming and produces a monolithic database that is disconnected from primary sources that are difficult to fully cite.
We are building a scalable, dependable cyberinfrastructure to facilitate new approaches to the discovery, acquisition, utilization, and citation of data and knowledge in the published literature.
The primary focus of this U.S. National Science Foundation EarthCube building block project (NSF ICER 1343760) is the construction of a cyberinfrastructure that is capable of supporting end-to-end text and data mining (TDM) and knowledge base creation/augmentation activities in the geosciences and biosciences. The infrastructure includes the following key components:
Automated, rate-controlled and authenticated original document fetching
Secure original document storage and bibliographic/source metadata management
Automated pre-processing of documents by multiple software tools; ability to quickly deploy new tools/versions of tools across all documents
API for basic full-text search and discovery capabilities
Ability to pre-index content using external dictionaries (e.g., Macrostrat lithologies)
Ability to generate fully documented, bibliographically complete testing and development datasets based on user-supplied terms
Capacity to support the deployment of user-developed TDM applications across full corpus, with on-demand updates as new relevant documents are acquired
