The Adaptation Collaboratory Project is an effort to fill a significant gap in understanding about adaptation to climate change. Here, we are building a virtual organization for transformative research and outreach. Drawing from a variety of tools (e.g., cyberinfrastructure, data and knowledge management, simulations, scenario analysis, and visual analytics) the collaboratory’s goals include interdisciplinary integration and sound policy development regarding adaptation to climate change.

The Garki Project was a study conducted by the WHO and the Nigerian Government from 1969-1976 on the effects of various methods to control the spread of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Garki is the name of a district in Nigeria where the study was conducted.) The project’s data were collected on paper, transferred to magnetic tape, and eventually converted to SQL. The Garki Project Website is an effort to make the Garki Project’s now static database accessible and easily queried through a convenient Web interface. Moreover, work done on the Garki Project is now being used as a springboard for handling similar data from other, modern studies of mosquitoes and malaria.

The Illustrative Information Interface (III) is a Web application that enables users to graphically and textually document perceived government repression. It accepts both historical and current information starting from the year 1900. Anyone with access to the Internet can use III to register his or her view of the scope and severity of government repression for a particular geographic area. The results of this information are immediately available, anonymously, for study.

The MTC is a project patterned after the Garki Project: a database of information related to malaria and its epidemiology combined with a Web front-end. Sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this project includes international collaborators who are gathering and analyzing data from Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the Solomon Islands, and Mali. The purpose of the MTC is to establish an evidence base that can help malaria control program managers make informed decisions about monitoring malaria transmission and implementing or adjusting malaria control interventions.

The Peace Accords Matrix project offers a good example of how a Web technology can bridge the gap between researchers and their data. Here, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies engaged the CRC's ICE team to rapidly build a Web server and database that would enable the storage and analysis of data related to peace accords throughout the world. Interactions with these data by the general public are made possible through a clickable map and a search dialog page. Data can be viewed online or downloaded as comma-delimited files.

The Varieties of Democracy project leverages the Plone content management system to collect and analyze democracy data from around the world. Hosted by the Kellogg Institute and the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, this project differs from the Peace Accords Matrix in that data are provided interactively through the website by knowledge-experts working abroad. The second iteration of the project (now under development) includes significant enhancements to administrative and data entry web pages, and enables several ways visualize data in chart-form.