"We have 1990s data access and 1960s data technology," says Lucian Russell, a computer systems engineer at Argonne National Laboratory who has a two-year grant from NSF to create an electronic bulletin board on scientific databases. "That's a recipe for disaster. We must come up with better ways to handle the vast amounts of data now available. If not, either there will be a massive duplication of effort and lots of mistakes, or only a small amount of the data will be accessible."
The goal of the NSF initiative, called Research on Scientific Databases, is to bring the skills of researchers, including computer scientists, to bear on a database problem that affects a particular discipline--from astronomy to zoology--with the hope of finding a solution of value to the entire scientific community. Last fall NSF officials took the first tentative step toward that goal by funding 11 proposals, for a total ...
