Scientific Rich Media Archive

Digital Cataloging, Storage and Hosting of Scientific
Graphics and Visualizations
http://sciencetelevision.net/

US supercomputing centers generate valuable scientific visualizations. These visualizations are seldom widely distributed or published, and the authors retain a master copy in a film or video format that will over time become obsolete. As a result, scores of government funded, scientifically valuable, and historically significant visualizations are scattered among different locations, in various formats and are not easily accessible to scientists, historians, students, and educators.

The Scientific Rich Media Archive (SRMA) will be a 24 month long collaborative NSDL Selection Services track project of the New Media Lab of the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Data and Knowledge Systems (DAKS) program at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). It will work with the Visualization and Public Relations groups at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). The SRMA project will create a distributed digital library of scientific visualizations and other rich media scientific materials. The library will be implemented as a federation of data grids, using the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) technology. The SRB was developed by the DAKS program. The SRB manages distributed data collections by providing both storage repository virtualization and data virtualization. Metadata is maintained separately for each digital entity in each data grid.

Intellectual Merit: The federation will function as a kind of "Napster" or "SourceForge" for scientific information. It will facilitate the growth of a self-sustaining peer-to-peer network for scientific visualizations and rich media. The SDSC currently uses an SRB to maintain a persistent archive for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). This project will add a vast distributed collection of visualizations to the NSDL. It will create a prototype federated SRB grid between supercomputing centers and will enable the centers to gain experience working together on a cyber infrastructure project. This grid can be expanded to include other sites and serve as a template for the building of federated grids for other collections.

Broader Impact: The SRMA will demonstrate to the NSDL an improved technology for the long-term preservation of independently created data collections. The data grid will be a venue for the publishing of scientific rich media assets. Its existence will foster a new culture of scientific publishing and communications, and this may lead to the development of new information exchange models within the scientific community. Enabling researchers to share their rich materials and metadata will increase the size of their audience and multiply opportunities for cross-fertilization. The viewers of the collection will have the ability to view it as they choose. Scientific viewers will be able to access the collection by content, author, and literature references, drawing heavily on metadata to locate relevant materials. Educators can use similar criteria to locate materials to illustrate a particular lesson. Others, such as high school or undergraduate students, can view it by institution and see which universities do the types of research that interest them. Television journalists and documentary filmmakers on the other hand, will be able to view it by subject or file format to obtain the critical stock footage necessary to create compelling stories about science. Artists and filmmakers will be able to access scientific images by visual criteria and use them for inspiration or inclusion in works.

The NSF Project Description is available as a PDF file.

Media Launchers for some sample video clips in the proposed Scientific Rich Media Archive:

Chemotaxis and Phagocytosis in Human Neutrophils a video created by cell biologist Frederick Maxfield.

This is related to the following publications:
Marks, P.W. and Maxfield, F.R. (1990) Ratio imaging of cytosolic free calcium in neutrophils undergoing chemotaxis and phagocytosis. Cell Calcium, 11: 181-190. Marks, P.W., and Maxfield, F.R. (1990) Transient increases in cytosolic free calcium appear to be required for the migration of adherent human neutrophils. J. Cell Biol., 110: 43-52.

Here are three an animations created by Prof. Robert L. Devaney of Boston University as part of research in the subject of Dynamical Systems.

1. Chaos shows the Julia Sets created by taking starting values along the indicated path on the inside and outside of the Mandelbrot Set.
2. Down the Spine shows the Julia Sets created by taking starting values along the spine of the Mandelbrot Set.
3. Spiraling Fingers another example of Julia sets.