(407d) DataNet Opportunities for Process Systems and Chemical Engineering

DataNet is a large NSF initiative to establish a new enabling cyber-infrastructure for sharing, re-using, and long-term preservation of important digital data. Digital data in this context means anything that can be stored in digital form (field or observational data, model data, software, images, video, text, and so on). Some of the principle goals of this initiative are to

1) Establish 5 DataNet partnerships across the US to create a superhighway for scientists to share, re-use, and preserve data that serve all programs supported by NSF.

2) Create a domain agnostic enabling cyber-infrastructure that frees scientists from the burdens of managing data and allows them to concentrate on science/engineering.

3) Permit scientists and engineers to address highly interdisciplinary and massively data driven technological challenges (e.g., grand challenge problems).

4) Foster new cross fertilization and collaborations between disciplines that heretofore have engaged in little or no collaboration to any significant degree.

5) Promote the use of standards and best practices for wide ranging inter-operability.

In this presentation, we give an overview of DataNet and summarize the opportunities available to the process systems engineering (PSE) community and chemical engineering at large that range from finding a centralized ?home' for important digital data (e.g., a repository of CAPE-Open compliant models) to leveraging cyber-infrastructure capabilities for research on data- driven problems (ab initio quantum chemistry, video analysis, carbon capture and storage, etc.) to education, outreach, grant writing, and entrepreneurship.