The Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) is a five year initiative designed to create cyberinfrastructure for ecological, environmental, and biodiversity research and to educate the ecological community about ecoinformatics. SEEK participants are building an integrated data grid (EcoGrid) for accessing a wide variety of ecological and biodiversity data and analytical tools (Kepler) for efficiently utilizing these data stores to advance ecological and biodiversity science. An intelligent middleware system (SMS) will facilitate integration and synthesis of data and models within these systems.

The Ecoinformatics Collaboratory is one of many institutions that have joined forces to create SEEK. The project's home page is seek.ecoinformatics.org. The principal end-user application being built in support of the SEEK and other projects is Kepler, which has its own home page at www.kepler-project.org.

A screenshot of the upcoming Kepler beta version

Scientists in a variety of disciplines (e.g., biology, ecology, astronomy) need access to scientific data and flexible means for executing complex analyses on those data. Such analyses can be captured as 'scientific workflows' in which the flow of data from one analytical step to another is captured in a formal workflow language. The Kepler project's overall goal is to produce an open-source scientific workflow system that allows scientists to design scientific workflows and execute them efficiently using emerging Grid-based approaches to distributed computation.

Kepler is based on the Ptolemy II system for heterogeneous, concurrent modeling and design. Ptolemy II was developed by the members of the Ptolemy project at UC Berkeley. Although not originally intended for scientific workflows, it provides a mature platform for building and executing workflows, and supports multiple models of computation.