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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/C531248/1
Title: DIALOGUE - Data Integration Applications: Linking Organisations to Gain Understanding & Experience
Principal Investigator: Atkinson, Professor MP
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Indiana University - Bloomington Ohio University (USA) University of Wien
Department: Sch of Informatics
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 12 April 2005 Ends: 11 April 2007 Value (£): 39,018
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Information & Knowledge Mgmt Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
Thanks to major investment by the UK e-Science Core Programme, the UK is at the forefront of work that provides convenient access to databases and other data resources via the grid and web services. This has the goal of supporting complex data integration from heterogeneous, independently administered, distributed data resources. Better support for such integration is becoming essential as the scale, diversity and quantity of data resources is growing very rapidly. This rich international environment of data has huge potential for discovery by combining independently collected data. Before this potential knowledge can be harvested it is necessary to develop data access and integration technology that can cope with this complex and ever changing environment of data resources.The ability to combine information conveniently, economically and reliably is vital for science, business, e-Health, e-Government, engineering and many other socially and economically significant activities. It will be an essential component of the UK's and Europe's e-Infrastructure.Building this e-Infrastructure is a major challenge. Each group collects its data in its own way. So data is stored in very different forms. Each group changes its arrangements for storing data, changing the structure, the way in which the things it observes are represented, and its policies for allowing data to be used. Imagine the different ways in which geologists have named rocks, the number of ways they collect samples, the different coordinate systems they use, and even the different ways they talk about time. Then imagine all the modern ways of collecting more data: fixed and mobile arrays of seismophones, satellite observations that use lidar, radar and GPS to monitor earth surface movements, vertically and horizontally. Add in the different ways in which paleobiologists describe species, chemists describe rock, meteorologists describe weather, and so on. Now in an area of great interest, data from all such sources may be collected and combined, as they are in the GEON project in California for the Yellowstone region.New production engineering is needed to combine data for a scientist who has an idea and wishes to test that idea by comparing data from many sources. New flexible production engineering is needed to continue to supply the scientist with her data as the data sources change.No one group posses the knowledge of all the kinds of data in use, of all the ways in which people want to combine data, and of all the methods we might use in the process. DIALOGUE will gather that expertise, as each partner has specialist knowledge covering a range of data challenges and has already developed methods they can apply. Using the framework of our existing technologies we will plan how we could build the complete flexible production engineering system (or at least a major part of it).
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