As part of the National Science Foundation's data efforts Brown Dog aims to provide and preserve long term access to data within collections of unstructured and uncurated files. Two services will be developed. The Data Access Proxy (DAP), an extensible and distributed file format conversion service, aims at making the web agnostic to the file formats which information is stored in and allowing users to more easily gain access to the contents of files. The Data Tilling Service (DTS) will serve as an active repository for analysis tools and provide a service by which to automatically extract metadata and content based signatures from files over the web. Together these two services stand as a building block between raw data collections and applications that would provide search capabilities of such collections and/or organize, relate, curate, or otherwise use their contents.
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