The US Depart­ment of Energy has launched the DOE Data Explorer (DDE), a tool to find sci­en­tific research data gen­er­ated in the course of DOE-sponsored research in var­i­ous sci­ence dis­ci­plines. The data that can be found include com­puter sim­u­la­tions, numeric data files, fig­ures and plots, inter­ac­tive maps, mul­ti­me­dia and sci­en­tific images.

The DOE Data Explorer includes a data­base of cita­tions pre­pared by the Office of Sci­en­tific and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion (OSTI) based on the infor­ma­tion found at data-hosting web sites. It is intended to be par­tic­u­larly use­ful to stu­dents, the pub­lic, and to researchers who are new to a field or look­ing for exper­i­men­tal or obser­va­tional data out­side their nor­mal field of expertise.

One can browse or search the data­base, then link to a data col­lec­tion where it resides. Users will often find spe­cialised search inter­faces and soft­ware toolk­its devel­oped by the data own­ers. These allow the users to search deeper into the data files and help them under­stand, analyse and use the data within the con­text of their own research interests.

The pub­licly avail­able data col­lec­tions sup­port DOE research results that are well doc­u­mented in jour­nal arti­cles, con­fer­ence lit­er­a­ture and tech­ni­cal reports. Key DOE data­bases of R&D infor­ma­tion are search­able through the Sci­ence Accel­er­a­tor. The DOE Data Explorer will include enhanced search capa­bil­i­ties across spe­cialised web sites as it con­tin­ues to grow.”

Source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, July 4, 2008