Database System Concepts
Information Management for Material Science Applications in a Virtual Laboratory
DEXA '01 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications
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Scientists from widely varying communities are frequently called upon to work together, sharing their data and their expertise to investigate a common issue. Difficulties frequently arise in sharing data because each community, and sometimes each scientist, has their own conventions for structuring the data. This results in a data schema that is incompatible with the other scientific communities working on the investigation. This paper presents VANILLA, a data schema developed to address these issues whose prototype shares data among the varied communities of forest canopy science. VANILLA uses techniques from semantic and dimensional databases in a federated approach to manage the sociological and technological issues in scientific data integration. All data is organized according to a thesaurus so that new data schemas can be rapidly built for the terminology of a new scientific domain or method. This data schema has been successfully used to store and analyze micro ecological forest data and stem map data.