“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”

  ~Albert Einstein

As you prepare your taxes, keep in mind that April is  Mathematics Awareness Month.  This year’s theme is, “Mathematics, Statistics and the Data Deluge”.

Mathematics is used throughout the world as an essential tool in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine and the social sciences. Large amounts of data are collected every day, and scientific data comes in massive amounts from supercomputers, sensor networks, astronomical instruments and other devices.  These data need to be sorted out and understood in order to be useful.

The White House recently released its Big Data Research and Development Initiative, and OSTI, was recognized as playing a "key role " in shaping the policies and technical implementation of the practice of data citation. Data citation enables efficient reuse and verification of data. 

OSTI not only ensures that DOE research is tracked, but that a scholarly structure is in place to reward data producers.  OSTI recently implemented a Data Identification Service across the DOE complex through which Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are assigned to research datasets, and then registered with DataCite to establish persistence. This initiative makes DOE datasets findable in commercial search engines (e.g. Google) and through federated search portals for science such as the DOE portal ScienceAccelerator.gov, the U.S. gateway Science.gov and the global search engine WorldWideScience.org. The importance of this undertaking is conveyed in the Administration's initiative, which states "By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help solve some the Nation's most pressing challenges."