In April this year the team responsible for the recently approved MDC project submitted a related proposal entitled 'EPrints to Data Centre' (EP2DC) to the JISC Rapid Innovation call.  We are pleased to announce that the EP2DC proposal has been approved for funding.  The financial and managerial assistance from JISC to promote the conservation of research data is greatly appreciated.  

The EP2DC project is based on the premise that the emergence of a semantic web of data offers the prospect of exciting new possibilities for knowledge discovery, and there are already clear indications that it will deliver on its potential.  A good example from the biological sciences is that of NextBio (http://www.nextbio.com/b/home/home.nb), an innovative biotech that is developing a robust framework to connect highly heterogeneous scientific data and textual information, thereby offering new opportunities to tackle complex problems.  For example, discovering connections between different pathologies at the clinical, environmental, and genetic/biochemical level provides a means to identify common disease pathways. 

For engineering materials, a similarly complex case exists for composition-property relationships in advanced alloys, a better understanding of which will facilitate improved alloy design, materials selection and lifing for a wide range of applications.  Integration of experimental data and textual information is especially exciting for inter-disciplinary knowledge discovery, which very often leads to new breakthroughs in science and technology simply as a consequence of connecting complementary activities in different domains.  With a semantic web of data, a systematic discovery of such inter-disciplinary connections will become feasible.  However, to realize this potential, efforts are needed to conserve experimental data together with the publications to which they correspond, and this is the motivation for EP2DC.  

The objective of EP2DC is to develop a prototype module to enable the EPrints repository (presently deployed at more than 250 institutes) to support the submission of XML-formatted experimental data together with the manuscript to which they correspond.  In this way it is hoped that an ever increasing body of experimental data will be captured and made available for future use by the scientific community.  The module will be tested and refined by an integration with the JISC-funded MDC but is intended to find application across all disciplines.