Tsukuba-WAN

Scientific Database Integration in Tsukuba-WAN †

Overview †

Tsukuba is a science city where over 50 national research institutes, commercial research institutes and universities are located.

Tsukuba-WAN is a 10GB/s ring - structure high speed network which connects major research institutes and supercomputers within Tsukuba City.

(picture from tsukuba-wan homepage)

Scientific Web Database resources in Tsukuba †

As a work of Tsukuba-WAN consortium, we are collecting scientific resource information which is available to the Internet. Examples are,

• Web database resources
  • geographical databases
  • life science databases
  • material science databases
  • reports and technical papers
• Open facilities and equipments
• Libraries

We are making a resource database of the metadata of these scientific databases. As a first step, we made a portal site which provides basic text search function for over 1000 web resources which we collected metadata.

Tsukuba research database resource portal (In Japanese) http://www.aist.go.jp/infobase/tsukubawan/

Tsukuba-WAN consortium homepage (In Japanese) http://www.tsukuba-wan.ne.jp/

Planned research activities based on our research resource database collection †

• Heterogeneous distributed database integration over different organizations.
  • Based on the grid technology
    • OGSA/SOA
    • Semantic Web/Grid

• High-level search function which explore:
  • Human networks and communities
  • Relationships and overlaps between research activities