The Future of Scientific Knowledge Discovery in the Virtual Environment

Project Summary Digital technologies and networks are widely regarded as having enhanced access to and use of scientific data, information, and literature significantly, and to have great promise for accelerating the discovery and the communication of knowledge both within the scientific community and in the broader society. Scientific knowledge discovery in the virtual environment, referred to in this proposal as computer-mediated or computational scientific knowledge discovery (SKD), may be defined as a research process that is enabled by different digital computing technologies such as data mining, information retrieval and extraction, artificial intelligence, distributed grid computing, and many other automated methods. Together, these technological capabilities are supporting the emergence of computer-mediated SKD as a new paradigm in the conduct of research. The technological advances have made possible dramatic improvements in the quantity and quality of knowledge discovery and utilization in all realms of human activity, not least in science. Although some of the exciting opportunities for technically improving these new research approaches have certainly begun to be realized, the study, measurement and understanding of such processes are arguably still only in their infancy. There are many barriers to their effective exploitation that are not generally well understood and that frequently present explicit, but difficult to assess, tradeoffs for research managers and funders. While techniques for studying and understanding the various attributes of computer-mediated SKD research exist in different contexts, they are not very well developed within the scientific community. A focused examination of the opportunities and barriers to the study of computer-mediated discovery of scientific knowledge on digital networks, with a view to identifying a range of research options for improving the understanding of these processes across the different scientific domains, can lead to significant enhancements in their efficiency and effectiveness. A symposium and workshop will be convened at the National Academies to bring together key stakeholders in this area for intensive and structured discussions in order to obtain a better understanding of the state-of-the-art and future trends in the study of computer-mediated SKD and to develop a range of options for future work in this area. Specifically, the project will be performed pursuant to the following statement of task: 1 We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the Department of Energy for developing this proposal and related background research.