A New Tool for Deep-Down Data Mining - Eos

In an ideal world, scientists would have access to the entire body of published scientific knowledge. They would be able to search this resource to rapidly locate and extract specific data in a way that is accurate, is repeatable, and leads to the discovery of new and related information. We're not there yet, but technology and information science have made great strides in this direction. Scientific publications contain measurements, descriptions, and images that have utility beyond the aims of the original work, particularly when they are aggregated into databases. For example, the Paleobiology Database contains field- and museum-based descriptions of more than 1.3 million fossil occurrences compiled from some 50,000 references, and sample-based geochemical data from the published literature are available in EarthChem.