Recent technological advances provide practical means to overcome such problems. Advances in computer architecture and network design, software, disk storage systems as well as the growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) now permit for the first time the management of gigabytes to terabytes of data and provide the ability to widely distribute this information to scientists, educators, students, and even the general public. The power of having all relevant information and knowledge along with access, modeling, and visualization tools all at one's finger tips has great potential in advancing science, accelerating the discovery process, and revolutionizing education. It is our goal in this project to bring this power to all scientists and interested parties with or without major computer resources and technological support.
Our specific goals in these research efforts are to:
- increase scientific productivity and the ability to deal with multidisciplinary data sets at all spatial scales by collecting, developing, and organizing data sets, data access tools, and codes to model and study the collected data sets;
- raise the quality of instruction from graduate to K-12 levels by promoting discovery-based learning and critical thinking skills with available tools, data sets and information;
- provide a vehicle to disseminate scientific knowledge to the general public;
- provide a Geoscience Information System that can link eventually with any future unified physical, natural and social science knowledge system.
