New Technology World

D. Ray Smith

When former local information technology company founder Bonnie Carroll started working as a librarian in the information business in 1971, there were no personal computers, no Internet, no World Wide Web. As she puts it, “If you were Rip Van Winkle and you fell asleep in the late 1960s and woke up, you would realize how much the world has changed in 50 years.”

In a recent talk by Carolyn Krause, Carol looked back on the history of the scientific and technical information (STI) business over the past half century. STI is defined as “a set of facts, analyzes and conclusions, both fundamental and applied, derived from scientific, technical and related engineering research and development efforts”.

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“I don’t think President Barack Obama’s administration gets enough credit for how it has changed the world of science and the world of data,” said founder of former local firm Information International Associates (IIa). Bonnie Carroll, author, said in a recent speech. To Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (FORNL).

“Obama opened the concepts of open government, open access, open science, and open data because most information was digitized. A 2013 memo by the president’s science adviser, John Holdren, was a watershed in the federal approach to scientific data: all results of federally funded research and development should be publicly accessible. I decided that it was necessary to

Combined with the White House Big Data R&D Initiative launched in 2012, the next step was to make open data easier to use and understand, she said. Such data was called her FAIR data (searchable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). As former Executive Director of the Commission on Scientific and Technical Data (CODATA), Carol has collaborated with two key players in this world of open data. One, CODATA president and lead author of “Science as an Open Enterprise,” Geoffrey Boulton, wrote that “not communicating data that supports scientific claims amounts to cheating.” .

Boulton wrote a report for Britain’s Royal Academy on why we need open data. His successor as president of CODATA, Leiden University’s Barend Mons, was one of the greatest proponents of his FAIR principles around the world.

US lost leadership role to Europe

Unfortunately, the United States has lost its leading role in national open data policy, she said.

“Europe has taken the lead in developing FAIR open data principles and implementation mechanisms. Interestingly, China is working hard to gain global leadership. is very recent.”

Before joining ORNL as librarian in 1971, Carroll had absorbed the lessons of a 1963 report by ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg to the White House called Science, Government, and Information.

“The report said information transfer is an integral part of research and development,” Carroll said. “The challenge was to deal with the ever-increasing quantity and changing quality of information. ”

Carroll’s last job at ORNL in the 1970s was to coordinate ORNL’s 24 mature information centers.

In the early 1970s, when she was at ORNL, she witnessed the first application of computers to information. It enabled relevant searches with its “Keywords in Context” (KWIC) system, which generates an alphabetical index of keywords that appear within the context of the abstract. article.

“The next big step in automating information retrieval was the result of the RECON system developed for NASA by Systems Development Corp. of San Diego. It was the predecessor of Google in the world.”

The STI infrastructure developed in the late 1960s with the establishment of government agencies such as the Defense Technical Information Center and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Technology Information in Oak Ridge, where Carroll worked.

“We knew how to collect documents and had summaries and indexes for various scientific disciplines and mission agencies, including nuclear science,” she said. “These activities, especially the automation of nuclear science abstracts, have been leadership advances in making scientific information digitally accessible.”

According to Carroll, here are some highlights from the history of STI that occurred after automation was first applied to scientific discipline systems such as Nuclear Science Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, and Index Medicus. In 1978, Arthur D. Little’s report, “Crossing the Threshold into the Information Age,” recommended that insights and social data from STIs are necessary for crisis management and decision-making.

A 1983 article in the journal Science states that thanks to electronic access systems, the availability of information is increasing more rapidly than the capacity to absorb it, reflecting one of Weinberg’s observations. I’m here. In the late 1990s, the Google search engine and his web made indexing unnecessary due to advances in computer free-text search.

Authors have attempted to publish on the Web as an alternative or supplement to publication in scientific journals. In the 1970s typed articles were mailed to journals, in the 1980s electronically published articles were emailed to journals, most of which eventually went online in addition to print. Preprints of his STI publications on the web have been on the rise, especially during his 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic. This makes it easier for researchers to submit their experimental results before peer review.

“Many studies show that peer review is not the most objective process in the world,” Carroll said. “Scientists post preprints on the web, and the entire scientific community can comment. It’s crowdsourced peer review.”

At the beginning of this century, Microsoft’s Jim Gray believed that science had become “data-intensive” and that there were four paradigms in science. empirical evidence, scientific theory, computational science, and now data science. He died suddenly in a tragic accident before his book The Fourth Paradigm was completed, so it was not published until 2009. One of his three co-authors who completed the book was Tony Hey, a consultant at ORNL.

On February 3, 2003, the National Science Foundation published the book “Cyber ​​Infrastructure Revolutionizes Science and Engineering” by Daniel Atkins of the University of Michigan. Hardware and software resources and services that efficiently connect laboratories over the Internet and enable scientists and engineers to participate remotely in shared experiments, computer modeling and data acquisition, integration, mining, and visualization. I envisioned an integrated system for

Critical to the development of information, Carroll said, was the realization that scientific data is part of the scientific infrastructure. Between the subsequent written governmental and national academy reports and the publication of Holdren’s memo, STI and scientific data have become part of the debate on the advancement of open data as a key pillar of science in the Fourth Paradigm. It was central.

Information International Associates (IIa), founded by Carroll in 1988, was originally a company that maintained clients’ libraries and produced scientific abstracts for the Energy Database (the successor to Nuclear Science Abstracts). However, IIa’s acquisition of his IT-only company has greatly inspired it to evolve into an IT company. IT uses computers and telecommunications to store, retrieve, and transmit digital information.

IIa provided information management and information technology services to government agencies and businesses. Information management includes helping customers identify information needs, acquire information, organize and store information, develop information products and services, and distribute and use information.Information technology services include computer development and management

Federal agency infrastructure. As threats grew, IIa provided cybersecurity services to its customers to protect them from unauthorized or criminal use of electronic data.

One of IIa’s smaller services was to research ways to address data privacy, Carroll said. The Internet of Things, with sensors in smartphones, computers, smart he speakers, energy meters, cars, baby monitors, ovens, refrigerators, etc., is fostering information overload and data misuse. How we behave, what we are most likely to buy, and whether our political views, purchasing habits, and health issues fit the profile of being a trustworthy employee or a good student It has become known to companies and institutions that want to predict what will happen.

“The scientific world is more concerned with information management issues than ever before,” says Carroll, because all data has been digitized. “The White House Office of Science said he had no interest in STI 30 years ago, but now he has four committees dealing with it.”

She concluded that 21st century science will take place in a fully digital world, thanks to new digital technologies, and that data-intensive science will foster creativity.

“Oakridge has a long history of involvement in managing scientific data and is well-positioned to take a national leadership position,” she added.

One reason for this is that Carroll, who was interim executive director of the World Data System International Program Office, a global consortium of data systems around the world, decided to join the Oak Ridge Innovation Institute, a joint venture between ORNL and the University of Tennessee. supported the introduction of in Knoxville.

It is one of her legacies of local and national significance.

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Carolyn, thanks to Bonnie Carroll for her in-depth review of her enormous efforts around the world. She is another example of Oak Ridge’s influence across many facets of scientific research and development. Her insight into the need for information technology services to address the computerization of all aspects of information gathering and reporting is astonishing.

She was able to see potential for future development and organize to meet those needs as they arose. Ridgeger is a truly wide-ranging influence and influencer in her chosen field.

She is also the most generous person who provides time and financial support to charities. Bonnie is one of us, but she is so much more. We’re proud of the path she’s taken and wish her all the best in her retirement (although she remains as busy as ever!).