The University of Florida, Cornell University, and a handful of other schools have received $12.2 million to build a social network for scientists and researchers. The goal of the project is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries. The project, funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will initially take the form of networks within each of the seven founding schools, which include Indiana University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research Institute, and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. The network could expand across the country within two years and eventually go worldwide, developers say. “The goal of the program is national networking of all scientists,” according to Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics for the University of Florida. “We often find that researchers have pretty good networks with students or with scientists at institutions where they received their degree or worked before. But they don’t always know people even at their own institutions.”<\/p>\n
Technologies used to support the effort will include VIVO<\/a>, an open source discovery tool developed at Cornell to search for research information across disciplines, departments, and colleges. The network also will exploit concepts of the Semantic Web<\/a>, the vision of web developer Tim Berners-Lee that provides a common framework for more useful data sharing across applications, enterprises, and communities. The effort is not the first seeking to connect scientists. A commercial venture, Epernicus<\/a>, is seeking to link life sciences researchers within companies and, eventually, across organizations.<\/p>\n