About Emerge

Emerge is an NCSA effort to develop middleware components of a new distributed search infrastructure which addresses the scale and heterogeneity of scientific data. Our components enable search services to interoperate across scientific domains by providing user-configurable tools for mapping between metadata schemas, performing search queries against multiple data sources, and performing query pre- and post-processing. Access to our search services is through platform-neutral standard and emerging-standard tools such as Z39.50, Open Archives, XML, and Java.

Here's a slide show with an overview of our research area and component architecture. And here's one which gives an overview of interoperability issues in distributed scientific information retrieval.

Collaborations

Emerge is part of NCSA's Data Mining and Visualization Division. Our components have been developed in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, the UIUC Digital Library Initiative and CANIS, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC, and NASA Project 30. We've also participated in panel discussions and advisory meetings with the Committee for Institutional Cooperation and the UIUC Library Gateway project.

Emerge is currently working with the NSF Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation to develop a curated repository of earthquake engineering data. Emerge is also supported by the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library in collaboration with the University of Missouri and the Virginia Tech Digital Library Research Laboratory.

News April 17, 2002: The newest version of grunk, the grammar understanding kernel has been released. This now has more updated examples, several bug fixes, and improved tutorial on grunklite and a small installer.Click here for more. October 2, 2001: Cocoa and "Open Archives in a box" (OAIB) are available as an alpha release. Please let us know if you need help trying out these new components or if you succeed at using them to set up Open Archives servers. See here for documentation and download it here. September, 2001: Here's a presentation about Cocoa. July 11, 2001: Cocoa (Components for Constructing Open Archives) is now available in pre-alpha form. It includes the Tropicos target as well as a simple target for serving metadata records from a directory. You can download it here. The jar file contains both the source code and the compiled classes. Watch this space for documentation. If you want to try out Cocoa and need help please send email to emerge-help@ncsa.uiuc.edu. Please note that Cocoa requires Xerces. July 5, 2001: A new OAI toolset called Cocoa will be available in pre-alpha form this month. Cocoa's server-side interface will provide several easy-to-use API's for building OAI services from file systems and SQL databases. We've used this tool to build an OAI interface to the Missouri Botanical Garden's Tropicos database of over 1.5 million botanical specimens. You can browse the service using the OAI Repository Explorer. June 5, 2001: A new, web-based demonstration GUI developed in collaboration with the University of Missouri will be released soon. Watch this space for details. A maintenance release of Gazelle will be released soon. Major features of this release include support for mysql and a Cygwin port. Feburary 20, 2001: Grunk 1.0 alpha 2 has been released. It includes a new API for embedding grunk in applications, as well as a new feature for nesting output nodes. Feburary 9, 2001: Grunk 1.0 alpha 1 has been released. Download it here or browse the documentation. Grunk is a tool for extracting structured metadata and data from structured and semi-structured text formats. Past News The demonstration GUI has been retired. The new demo GUI is unfinished and only demonstrates some of Gazebo's features, but it is more stable than the old GUI. See the download page for details. A preliminary alpha version of our Java XER tools are available. View the documentation or download them here. Emerge was featured in the August 27th, 1999 edition of Science magazine, in the NetWatch column (Vol. 285, number 5432). The article describes recent work to integrate NCSA's Astronomy Digital Image Library with diverse sources of astronomy data using Emerge components and a new XML format called AML (Astronomy Markup Language), developed by Damien Guillaume. This work was covered in a paper co-authored by Bob McGrath, Ray Plante, Guillaume and Joe Futrelle, which was presented Aug. 13 at the Digital Libraries '99 meeting in Berkeley, CA.

Contact

Emerge can be reached at emerge@ncsa.uiuc.edu and at futrelle@ncsa.uiuc.edu.