UVic is making its academic research accessible to everyone.

The university has been granted $1.5 million to fund two projects that will focus on the preservation of groundbreaking particle physics data and on bringing ocean research data to the public.

The grant is part of a $10.5-million budget announced by Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation network (CANARIE). CANARIE was established in 1993, and manages an ultra high-speed network that facilitates cutting-edge research across Canada and around the world.

One project, “Data From the Deep, Judgments From the Crowds,” will invite members of the public to review short video and sound clips collected by the offshore observatories NEPTUNE and VENUS, and provide researchers with their annotations.

NEPTUNE, which stands for “North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments,” and VENUS, which stands for “Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea,” are two experiments that comprise a network of automated underwater observatories which collect data concerning changes on the ocean floor.

The “Data from the Deep” project will also establish a separate observatory at Brentwood College to allow students to view data and remotely control the instrument. The system will be accessible by students from other schools across the country.

NEPTUNE’s Associate Director of Information Technology Benoit Pirenne says this concept of “crowd-sourcing” will allow scientists to draw on feedback to make more conclusive decisions about the data.

“I hope it will provide scientists with the help they need to deal with the incessant fire hose of data,” Pirenne said.

The second project receiving funding is the HEP Legacy Data Project, which will develop technology at UVic and other sites across Canada and the U.S. to preserve BaBar Project particle physics data — BaBar is an international experiment that collected data at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre between 2000 and 2008.

The data has been used by scientists from UVic and other universities around the world who are attempting to understand why the universe is composed only of matter, and not antimatter.

Data preservation has become a major issue in all research fields.

“The National Archives of Canada worries about preserving electronic media. Our problem is similar, but a bit different,” said Randall Sobie, a UVic physics professor, and researcher with Canada’s Institute of Particle Physics. “We have many hundreds of terabytes of data and very complex code is required to read it.”

The funding for the project will allow the long-term preservation of the data as well as the software and computing environment necessary to read it.