TEACHING INTEGRATIVE ‘END TO END' SCIENCE SOLUTIONS THROUGH INFORMATICS

College Instructors at all levels have attempted to teach the importance of organizing data towards a more holistic understanding and solution of complex earth science questions. In a senior level capstone seminar, students were encouraged to describe the many geologic factors that are utilized by professional geologists in understanding scientific issues related to management of nuclear waste, including stable sites for isolation. Although it is common practice to encourage students to write technical reports, they are often unaware of the relationship between their chosen disciplinary topic and the overall understanding of the multi-disciplinary question. For example, topics studied by individual students ranged from in-situ vitrification to paleo-climate, but it was difficult for the class as a whole to relate individual projects to the broader topic of nuclear waste management. The capturing of information through knowledge representation tools is a common technique utilized in geoinformatics, and often allows the user to see the full range of relationships between data and phenomenon. We utilized a knowledge modeling kit (http://cmap.ihmc.us/) to create a concept map for effectively organizing all the data in a hierarchically structured form with interrelationships such as ‘comprised of', ‘includes', and ‘is a' . The organization of all the data related to nuclear waste site, concepts behind the data and their relationship to phenomenon, such as seismicity ,volcanism, and landslides allowed students to see how disciplinary datasets (over thirty five were identified by the students)routinely obtained by geoscientists (and others) would interact with each other. Although not all possible explicit relationships were identified in class activities, the value of bringing the students together in a virtual classroom through web based interactive knowledge modeling could become a very useful technique in promoting an understanding of ‘end to end science' solutions for complex and societally relevant questions.