The internet

The Internet, so powerful for sharing text, images, sounds and videos, is now weakest at doing that for which it was originally designed - exchanging raw data between researchers. Last month, the National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago launched the first version of an infrastructure called Data Space Transfer Protocol, or DSTP, for creating the next generation web of data. The current Web provides an infrastructure for working with distributed multimedia documents, which are exchanged using the familiar "http," or Hypertext Transfer Protocol. But although a massive amount of data is available online, it is stored in so many different formats that it has become difficult, if not impossible, to analyze and use in research, says Georg Reinhart, visiting research scientist in mathematics, statistics, and computer science at UIC.