Welcome to the Datastar website.

As part of this project, Cornell University’s Albert R. Mann Library, in partnership with Washington University in St Louis, will analyze researchers’ needs and preferences to share and discover datasets and to enhance the Datastar semantic platform for this use. Librarians at both Cornell and Washington University will gather information from researchers across a number of disciplines by performing in-depth interviews and presenting case studies to report and summarize the results.

As part of this investigation, the team of developers will transition the semantic platform (originally spelled DataStaR) developed at Cornell University from a single library software prototype to a well-documented, open-source platform ready for adoption and extension at other institutions wishing to provide research data sharing and discovery services. Datastar’s ability to expose metadata about research datasets in a standard semantic format called Linked Data will be enhanced to support selective interchange of related information with VIVO, an open-source semantic researcher networking tool gaining prominence through adoption at multiple U.S. universities, in the federal government, and internationally.