Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > U Illinois Grant To Tame Unstructured Data for Research

News

U Illinois Grant To Tame Unstructured Data for Research

6/5/2007

By Paul McCloskey

The Andrew Mellon Foundation last week awarded $1.2 million grant to the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to help find ways to solve the so-called "80 percent problem."

The challenge of the problem is developing tools to access the 80 percent of all information that is unstructured, not residing in easily accessible computer formats, or is open source-based or not secret.

The grant, which will be shared with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, will build on NCSA's D2K software--which analyzes data in a variety of research and business domains--and IBM's Unstructured Information Management Architecture.

The goal is development of what the researchers call a Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR), which will help bridge unstructured and structured data.
"There are trillions and trillions of bytes of data available, but the collections are dispersed and finding the relevant material is time consuming," said Michael Welge, the principal investigator on the project. "Someone who wants to research 19th century novels or the work of Cervantes has a wealth of information available to them, but without tools to help them they'll spend a long time searching that haystack for their particular needle."

Read More:


Paul McCloskey is a contributing editor for the Campus Technology group of publications.

Cite this Site

Paul McCloskey, "U Illinois Grant To Tame Unstructured Data for Research," Campus Technology, 6/5/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=48375

copy text (above) for proper citation



Recommended Reading
  • Vista Ramp Up Is Happening Now, Study Says

    Organizations may have been slow to adopt Microsoft Windows Vista, but expect that to change by late 2008 to 2009, according to a Forrester Research report by Benjamin Gray et al., published last week.

  • Bringing Composers into Classrooms Through Skype

    Two Pennsylvania teaching colleagues with an interest in music and technology are bringing remote experts into classrooms at almost no cost, using Skype's free videoconferencing technology.

  • Columbia U Going Live on iTunes U

    Columbia University has been beta testing its content through iTunes U, the Apple desktop media player for education-related podcasting. The New York-based university expects to go live with its release at the start of the fall semester.

  • Let the Games Begin! Google vs. Microsoft

    Pursuing a strategy as a consumer of services and choice, Drexel University has partnered with both Google and Microsoft to provide students with massive e-mail mailboxes, gigabytes of file storage with collaboration tools, Web-based calendars, personal blogs, and more.

  • Let the Games Begin! Google vs. Microsoft

    Pursuing a strategy as a consumer of services and choice, Drexel University has partnered with both Google and Microsoft to provide students with massive e-mail mailboxes, gigabytes of file storage with collaboration tools, Web-based calendars, personal blogs, and more.

  • Let the Games Begin! Google vs. Microsoft

    Pursuing a strategy as a consumer of services and choice, Drexel University has partnered with both Google and Microsoft to provide students with massive e-mail mailboxes, gigabytes of file storage with collaboration tools, Web-based calendars, personal blogs, and more.

Related Articles

send e-mail link to articleEmail this article

print this articlePrintable Format