Scientific Annotation Middleware

A NC Base Program Project

The practice of science is critically dependent on complete and accurate documentation of experiment processes and results. However, with the advent of computing and large scale simulation, experiment complexity, data size and dimensionality, and the overall number of experiments performed have exploded, stretching traditional annotation methods beyond their limits. Scientific Annotation Middleware (SAM) will include components and services that enable researchers, applications, problem solving environments (PSE) and software agents to create and manage metadata and annotations about data objects and the semantic relationships between them.

The goal is to create a layered set of components and services that provide successively more specialized capabilities for the creation and management of metadata, the definition of semantic relationships between data objects, and the development of electronic research records.

The objectives of this project are

• Single unified metadata infrastructure
• Annotation services for next-generation scientific computing environments with significant reduction of integration barriers
• Advanced notebook view of annotation data

For more info, see:

• Project website: Scientific Annotation Middleware
• 2-Page Summary, March 2004 (PDF)
• 2-Page Summary, March 2003 (PDF)
• 4-Slide Presentation, March 2003 (PowerPoint Presentation)
• Executive Summary: Scientific Annotation Middleware
• Overview: Scientific Annotation Middleware (PDF, 186KB)