New Web portal to help renewable-energy researchers share knowledge, work smarter

A team of Florida State University information experts has built a new Web portal that could modernize how researchers in the increasingly important field of sustainable energy share their work.

The new Renewable Energy Research Portal will also, its creators hope, serve as a model for a state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure offering a more sophisticated way to use the Internet to efficiently seek out and disseminate scientific research.

Launched this month, the portal was developed by the team of Ian Douglas, associate program director of Florida State’s Learning Systems Institute and an associate professor in the College of Communication & Information; Chris Hinnant, an assistant professor in the College of Communication & Information and assistant director of the college’s Information Institute; and Charles McClure, director of the Information Institute and a Francis Eppes Professor of Information Studies. A $200,000 grant from the university’s Institute for Energy Systems, Economics and Sustainability funded the portal, which identifies, organizes and provides access to information related to the burgeoning field of renewable and alternative energy.

Hinnant and McClure executed the needs assessment for the project.

“The main idea,” said Hinnant,” is to promote collaboration and information exchange within this emerging community of researchers, policymakers and the public.”

Douglas handled design and construction of the applications and databases. An expert on increasing human performance with the use of technology, he says many developers remain stuck in a pre-Internet mindset, slow to exploit the medium’s full potential. Web resources often consist of long lists of links (often broken) and information (often outdated), creating a needle-in-a-haystack dilemma for users.

The new energy portal, however, takes advantage of the Internet’s incredible power. Featuring searchable databases of researchers, projects, articles and events, it helps people find and share specific information quickly. Douglas adopted an iPhone model for the interface, with each utility presented as a separate application that in the future can be accessed by an actual iPhone “app.”

This type of innovation is in demand among scientists, who have begun to realize that the still-dominant way of sharing research — waiting for results to be published in a journal — is too slow and inexact for the digital age. The new portal’s design funnels users to specific information without their having to wade through megabytes of extraneous facts; it also gives them a venue and tools for sharing the latest data. The portal also gives researchers a venue and tools for sharing the latest data, including useful links to renewable-energy professional associations, government agencies and research organizations at the state, national and global levels.

The portal was launched with hundreds of entries and the expectation that researchers will fill in the gaps, making this site about sustainable energy — well, self-sustainable. That’s precisely what happened with another Douglas creation, the Global Usability Knowledge Management project. That portal, the most comprehensive resource on the Internet for identifying labs and research centers dedicated to improving the ease of use of technology interaction, served as the model for the energy portal design. Douglas and graduate students from the Learning Systems Institute and the Information Institute added the first entries before the site was launched. As the site grew in popularity, more and more researchers added information, eventually contributing about half the portal’s 447 records.

The usability portal created a place for a worldwide community of experts to form, trade information and collaborate on the design and testing of usable products for global markets. Douglas envisions the same future for the new portal.

“We hope the energy portal will not only enable partnerships but be a prime source of knowledge for work in progress,” he said.

Although the renewable-energy portal is currently limited to research in Florida, the team hopes it will expand nationwide and even internationally, as the usability portal has done.

Florida State University Vice President for Research Kirby Kemper said the portal shows a lot of promise for researchers in Florida and beyond.

“This Web site allows the residents of Florida and others around the world to be able to quickly contact experts on energy and sustainability from Florida’s universities,” he said.

One of the most powerful aspects of the new portal is the potential it demonstrates for other communities: The software behind it can be tailored to help other groups of researchers take full advantage of the Internet’s ability to share, seek and use information.

For more information, visit http://energyportal.cci.fsu.edu/index.html or send an e-mail to energy@cci.fsu.edu.