Research Project Ideas

Provenance-Aware * Provenance is the lineage or derivation history of an object. There are a number of environments in which researchers work that would become more powerful research tools of they tracked data provenance of the outputs that they created. There are a number of ways to attack this project. One would be to take an existing environment (e.g., R) and make it provenance-aware. A second approach is to construct a provenance-aware environment for a particular set of researchers. For example, there is an active research group at Harvard conducting research on gorilla populations. They would find it quite useful to have a provenance-aware environment in which to conduct all their different analyses.

Active Word A research paper today is a particular expression of a set of ideas, data, programs, graphs, images, etc. There is much discussion about creating documents that contain not only the specific expression, but all the data and programs that back the expression, thus allowing "readers" to become active participants in the research. For this project, one might begin with Open Office and modify it to produce a publication production system that allows a researcher to include text, programs, images, data, and all the elements of the research that back a particular project.