Resources and Funding

NSF Research Sources

• CISE 08-575 http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08575/nsf08575.htm
  • This program has 3 core areas. The second core area is the most appropriate: Information Integration and Informatics (III)
  • Proposals are in 3 sizes with separate due dates:
    • Small Projects, with total budgets up to $500,000 for durations of up to three years, Due 2008.12.17
    • Medium Projects, with total budgets ranging from $500,001 to $1,200,000 for durations up to four years, Due 2008.10.31
    • Large Projects, with total budgets ranging from $1,200,001 to $3,000,000 for durations of up to five years, Due 2008.11.28

NSF Infrastructure Sources

• Note: NSF only supports infrastructure to serve research
• The Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) NSF 07-601 http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.htm
  • This program is the Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet) Program
  • These are 5-year awards which can be as much as $20M.
  • There is an FAQ at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08021/nsf08021.jsp
  • Preliminary proposals are due 2008.11.13
  • Full proposals are due 2009.05.15
  • The proposals are multi-institutional but one institution must be the lead institution.
• The Computing Research Infrastructure (COI) NSF 08-570 http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08570/nsf08570.htm
  • Proposals are due 2008.09.22
  • There are 2 classes of award. The relevant one is: Community Infrastructure (CI).
    • These awards support the planning for computing research infrastructure, or the creation of new computing infrastructure, or the enhancement of existing computing research infrastructure to enable world-class research and education opportunities for broadly-based communities of researchers and educators that extend well beyond the awardee institutions. Furthermore, CI awards support the operation of such infrastructure, ensuring that awardee institutions are well-positioned to provide a high quality of service to community researchers and educators expected to use the infrastructure to realize their research and education goals.
  • The CI awards are subdivided into Planning and Acquisition awards.
    • CI Planning (CI-P) grants of up to $100,000 for durations of up to 1 year to prepare for the submission of a CI-ADDO proposal.
    • CI Acquisition, Development, Deployment and/or Operations (CI-ADDO) grants of up to $4 million for durations of up to 4 years to either a) create and operate new computing research infrastructure, or b) enhance and operate existing computing research infrastructure, or c) operate existing computing research infrastructure. NSF will provide no more than $250,000 per year for operating the infrastructure.
• Advances in Biological Informatics (ABI) NSF 08-563 http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08563/nsf08563.htm
  • This program focuses on biological research.
  • The due date is 2008.08.11 so it has already passed.
  • The next due date is 2009.08.11.

Long-Term Funding

• To ensure that the OOR remains as a sustainable infrastructure, there must be some form of long-term funds.
  • An endowment would be the ideal source, but there are few agencies that would fund it.
    • This strategy requires someone with endowment fund-raising expertise.
  • A consortium is another possibility, but it requires a continuing effort to maintain the funding.
    • Many funding agencies are willing to provide seed funding if there are matching funds from other sources.

Funded Research Projects

• NIH Grant 1R01LM009725-01A1
  • Enhancing Organism Based Disease Knowledge Via Name Based Taxonomic Intelligence
  • This is an R01 grant to be funded by the National Library of Medicine.
  • The Principal Investigator is Neil Sarkar of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.
  • The project includes the following institutions:
    • The Marine Biological Laboratory: Neil Sarkar and Catherine Norton
    • Northeastern University: Ken Baclawski
    • University of Chicago School of Medicine: Yves Lussier
  • The OOR was mentioned in the proposal in section C.4.
    • Open Ontology Repository
    • Ontology based tools, such as browsers and reasoners, are very powerful and useful. However, in practice, most of these tools can only deal with relatively small ontologies. This is a serious limitation when an ontology is very large and complex, which is the case for many biomedical ontologies. It becomes even more problematic when one must mediate between several large ontologies, each with its own suite of tools and techniques for accessing, reasoning and browsing. While the ontology community has successfully established standard languages for representing, querying and reasoning about ontology information, it has only recently begun to address the problem of standardizing protocols for storing, registering and retrieving ontology information. The Open Ontology Repository (OOR) Initiative is a recent effort to promote the global use and sharing of ontologies. Dr. Baclawski was one of the founders of the OOR.
    • The OOR charter is to: (1) Establish a hosted registry-repository; (2) Enable and facilitate open, federated, collaborative ontology repositories; and, (3) Establish best practices for expressing interoperable ontology and taxonomy work in registry-repositories, where an ontology repository is a facility where ontologies and related information artifacts can be stored, retrieved and managed. By participating in the OOR Initiative, the proposed research will be able to take immediate advantage of the state-of-the-art in ontology-based tools being developed at research centers and companies throughout the world. Additionally, a synergistic relationship is anticipated where the proposed research can contribute ontology-based use cases pertaining to infectious disease studies.