The NC Health Info website (www.nchealthinfo.org) is a goldmine of health information for North Carolina consumers, a one-stop shop to search for healthcare services and reputable information on diseases, treatments, prevention and more.

Like most websites that contain large amounts of information, NC Health Info uses metadata, or cataloging information that describes an entry on the site, to make the entries discoverable through a search of the site. Because metadata matters so much on large, database-driven sites, keeping it accurate and up to date is crucial. It also promises to be much easier in the future, thanks to a collaboration between RENCI, the UNC School of Information and Library Science/Metadata Research Center (SILS/MRC), and NC Health Info, a Web resource developed by the Health Sciences Library at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Last year Jane Greenberg, Francis Carroll McColl Term Professor in SILS and director of the SILS/MRC, and Christie Silbajoris, director of NC Health Info, received funding from the National Network of Libraries in Medicine to research effective ways to automatically maintain the metadata that describes resources on the NC Health Info website. They partnered with RENCI to develop the software that would turn what has always been a time consuming manual task into a semi-automated system.

“NC Health Info aggregates information from more than 7,000 websites,” said Nassib Nassar, the RENCI senior research software developer who worked on the project. “Until now, if there was a change on one of those websites that affected the quality or accuracy of the metadata, it required a staff member to manually search all those sites, find all the relevant new information and then update the metadata.”

Nassar worked with the research team to develop a prototype software system that tracks changes on thousands of websites and highlights them. A cataloguer can then easily evaluate the new information and determine how to change metadata related to a specific site. For example, if a health center included on the NC Health Info site adds a new doctor specializing in sports medicine, the software detects the change on the center’s website and highlights the new information. A cataloguer can then easily update the metadata to reflect this new expertise provided by the health center. As a result, a consumer searching for a sports medicine doctor would be able to find this new expert through a search of the NC Health Info website soon after the doctor joins the medical staff.

“”It is prohibitively expensive to manually generate and maintain metadata,” said Greenberg. “This collaboration has allowed us to develop and test an approach that takes advantage of automatic techniques and that should translate into more cost effective metadata maintenance in NC Health Info.”

The automated system is still experimental, but the researchers believe it could become a model for other health information websites in the Medline Plus Go Local system of sites, which includes 32 health information sites including NC Health Info.

“The larger significance of this project is that it can help a whole network of Go Local sites decrease the staff time needed to keep information accurate and thereby allow them to pay more attention to growing their databases and bringing more health information to North Carolinians and citizens nationwide,” Silbajoris said. “RENCI’s expertise in software development relevant to managing large databases was a great asset for us. We hope to continue to collaborate with RENCI as we turn our prototype automated cataloging system into a production system.”

About RENCI
The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a multi-institutional organization, brings together multidisciplinary experts and advanced technological capabilities to address pressing research issues and to find solutions to complex problems that affect the quality of life in North Carolina, our nation and the world. RENCI expertise and resources span the span the fields of high performance computing, visualization, networking and data technologies. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.

The research team will hold appointments in Carolina’s nationally recognized School of Information and Library Science with research space in Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The award-winning research group brings expertise in development of digital data technologies, including open source software that enables sharing of data in collaborative research, publication of data in digital libraries, and preservation of data in persistent archives for use by future generations, along with a research portfolio exceeding $10 million.

“The opportunity to recruit an entire group of active researchers with an international reputation for vision, innovation and accomplishment is rare, perhaps even unprecedented in information and library science,” said Chancellor Holden Thorp. “Their work is closely aligned with the school’s efforts in the areas of digital libraries and archives, databases, institutional repositories, information retrieval and information management. Our students and many others across campus will have an extraordinary opportunity to learn from and collaborate with this world-class research team.”

Research team leaders Reagan Moore, Ph.D.; Richard Marciano, Ph.D.; and Arcot Rajasekar, Ph.D.; are in the process of being appointed as full professors in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), recognized by U.S. News and World Report magazine as the top school of its kind in the nation. Other members of the DICE group will move to Carolina in the next few months.

“The DICE group will function as a magnet for students and collaborators,” said José-Marie Griffiths, school dean. “The group will help us further extend the research computing infrastructure at UNC that will benefit us all, improve our capacity and capability to conduct larger-scale research projects, while inspiring new generations of students to understand that considerable attention and deliberate effort are needed to ensure both effective and long-term access to information.”

Group members will interact with colleagues in the school and other campus units on academic digital library and preservation research efforts, initially focusing on current collaborations such as the National Archives and Records Administration Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype and the National Science Foundation Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure project, along with others such as the Library of Congress Video Archiving project.

“A major challenge for the next several decades will be managing the enormous amount of digital data we create in science and research,” said Alan Blatecky, RENCI’s interim director. “The DICE group has years of experience and an international reputation for developing innovative systems for managing distributed digital data. This will be a huge advantage for Carolina as the wave of new data rapidly becomes a tsunami. We will have the opportunity to extend our leadership nationally and internationally in managing, sharing, publishing and archiving research data.”

Other potential areas for collaboration include biomedical and health data management, grid computing and cyberinfrastructure with Carolina’s Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute and its recently announced National Institute of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award, visualization of large-scale data sets with the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of computer science and with RENCI, as well as shared institutional repositories and digital library systems with RENCI and the Triangle Research Libraries Network. Additional collaborations in the sciences, social sciences and humanities are expected.

“The DICE group, in collaboration with SILS, will pursue development of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral level courses on data grids and preservation environments,” Moore said. “The opportunity to teach academic courses strongly influenced the decision to move to SILS and UNC. We are also interested in pursuing collaborations for the creation of campus cyberinfrastructure and participating on data management projects in support of education, patient medical records and emergency preparedness.”

For more than 10 years the group’s Storage Research Broker (SRB) data grid has been used by research teams worldwide to automate all aspects of manipulation of large, distributed data files, including discovery, access, retrieval, management, replication, archiving and analysis. DICE most recently developed iRODS, the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which introduced user-settable rules that automate complex management policies, helping users tame today’s mushrooming collections of digital data.

The team has worked on national and international projects, providing data management systems for major grid and distributed research projects, including the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the Worldwide University Network, California Digital Library-Digital Preservation Repository, the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the Geoscience network.

On Thursday (Aug. 29), the DICE group will receive the 2008 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists during the group’s annual meeting in San Francisco. A society news release said the award honors “an individual, institution or organization that promotes greater public awareness, appreciation or support of archives. The DICE group was selected for its long-time support of and involvement in the archives profession’s work to address the challenges of managing, preserving, and providing access to electronic records.”

School of Information and Library Science Web site: http://sils.unc.edu/
RENCI Web site: http://www.renci.org/
DICE Web site: http://diceresearch.org
iRODS Web site: http://www.irods.org

Contacts:
School of Information and Library Science contact: Wanda Monroe, (919) 962-8366, wmonroe at unc.edu
RENCI contact: Karen Green, (919) 445-9648, kgreen at renci.org
DICE contact: Paul Tooby, (858) 822-3654, ptooby at diceresearch.org
UNC News Services contact: Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093, lisa_katz at unc.edu

The SILS/Metadata Research Center at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) leads the project, called BOT 2.0 (Botany through Web 2.0, the Memex and Social Learning). In addition to RENCI, other partners in the project are the North Carolina Botanical Garden (NCBG), the UNC Herbarium and UNC Information Technology Services (ITS). BOT 2.0 is a two-year project funded by the National Science Foundation and led by Jane Greenberg, Francis Carroll McColl term professor and director of the Metadata Research Center at SILS, and Alan Weakley, curator of the UNC Herbarium, a department of the North Carolina Botanical Garden.

BOT 2.0 aims to actively engage students in the learning process and in self evaluation  using Web 2.0 social computing technologies, such as Facebook, MySpace, blogs, and cell phones. RENCI will help to create technology that will easily allow students share, access, link, and relocate digital information that students will collect in the field.

“BOT 2.0’s technology is conceptually modeled on a memex, a memory augmentation framework that allows students to share, link, correlate and re-find digital information through the application of structured metadata and collaborative tagging,” said Michael Shoffner, the project’s technology architect and a research programmer at RENCI and ITS.  Metadata  is used to describe other data and make data easier to find when it is stored. On the Web, metadata tags are often used to describe content, making it easier for search engines to find and catalogue websites and pages.

To introduce the program, the Bot 2.0 team has organized a summer camp, called BotCamp, for selected students with nontraditional backgrounds. BotCamp will kick off in July with 17 students from Alamance Community College, North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University and UNC at Chapel Hill.

“Our team is very excited about BotCamp, an invitational summer program that includes outings to the UNC Arboretum, the Herbarium and other natural surroundings with botanical experts, as well as information management and technology sessions at SILS,” Greenberg said. “We want to empower students, not only by using technology, but by enhancing their knowledge of botany and by teaching them about the power of metadata and tagging as they build a collective memex.”

“Web 2.0 technology offers an innovative and exciting opportunity to engage students in botany, throughout the state of North Carolina and beyond,” Weakley said.

Evelyn Daniel, a SILS professor and project principal, commented that “a long standing goal of the collaboration between botany and information science, over the last six years, has been to use information technology to link students with the natural world.  Bot 2.0 allows us to extend our efforts to undergraduates.”

Interested students and those from other colleges or universities who would like to participate in BotCamp 2009 should contact Greenberg by calling 919.962.8066 or by sending e-mail to: janeg@email.unc.edu

For more information about BOT 2.0, please access the Metadata Research Center Web site at http://ils.unc.edu/mrc/

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.