Autocuration Cyberinfrastructure for Scientific Discovery and Preservation

DIBBs Brown Dog is a recent cyberinfrastructure effort which aims to create two new services to aid users in the searching, accessing, and usage of digital data and provide these services in a manner that is as broadly and easily accessible as possible. At its lowest level, the Data Access Proxy (DAP) providing file format conversion capabilities and the Data Tilling Service (DTS) providing content based extractions, will be accessible via a deliberately compact REST interface. On top of this a number of client libraries and applications can and are being constructed to even further reduce the overhead of accessing the provided functionality (e.g. libraries in Javascript, Python, R, Matlab and interfaces such as bookmarklets, browser extensions, and other standalone applications). At the heart of the two services, however, is their extensibility, allowing one to potentially incorporate any library or tool as a conversion or extraction component within the services towards both the leveraging of the functionality they provide as well as the preservation of the tools themselves.