Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) Harvard University

Joe Futrelle has been working for over a decade at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to increase access to and improve the quality of shared collections of scientific and cultural information through the application of digital library and semantic web technologies and techniques. Futrelle’s software tools for distributed search, metadata harvesting, and semantic content management have been used in a variety of scientific and cultural domains including astronomy, biology, medicine, education, seismology, earthquake engineering, research administration, music, history, and environmental hydrology. Futrelle’s research focuses on building semantic data models and associated software that can harness network effects in order to create living, evolving knowledge spaces capable of linking and merging information across disicplinary, institutional, temporal, and geographic boundaries. These emerging knowledge spaces can support the systems-scale interdisciplinary science required to meet some of the greatest challenges of our time, as well as ensuring that the valuable fruits of such research can be preserved and used indefinitely in an era of rapid technological obsolescence.