LHC goes live

Computing has a front page story on the LHC going live tomorrow:
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2223424/grid-awaits-secrets-universe-4158895 and the implications for data management

New classification scheme for research in Australia and New Zealand

"The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and Statistics New Zealand (Statistics NZ) have
jointly developed ANZSRC to serve as a standard research classification for both
countries. It will improve the comparability of research and development statistics
between the two countries and the rest of the world. For the ABS and Australian
stakeholders, ANZSRC replaces the Australian Standard Research Classification (ASRC
1998) and for Statistics NZ and New Zealand stakeholders ANZSRC introduces a new
framework to measure R&D activity."
http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/2A3A6DB3F4180D03CA25741A000E25F3/$File/12970_2008.pdf

Building Effective Virtual Organisations

Webcasts from a recent NSF event:
http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/events/VirtOrg2008/index.php?pg=main

OGC and OASIS collaborating on standards

Press release from OGC (http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/849) about their collaboration with OASIS:
"The groups point to Web services as a key area of their cooperation. With the existing OGC Web Services (OWS) standards, most of the standards needed to publish, discover and use Web-resident geospatial data and services on the Web are in place. However, OWS must work in concert with other Web services standards. That's why OGC members approved the ebRIM (electronic business Registry Information Model) OASIS Standard as the preferred cataloging meta-model foundation for future application profiles of the OpenGIS® Catalog Service Web (CS-W) Standard. "

ACRL environmental scan 2007

The Association of College and Research Libraries in the US recently published their Environmental Scan 2007 (http://www.acrl.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/whitepapers/Environmental_Scan_2.pdf). Their Top 10 Assumptions are:

1. There will be an increased emphasis on digitizing collections, preserving digital archives, and improving methods of data storage, retrieval, curation, and service.
2. The skill set for librarians will continue to evolve in response to the changing needs and expectations of the populations they serve, and the professional background of library staff will become increasingly diverse in support of expanded service programs and administrative needs. Mentions the idea of a "blended librarian" a hybrid of traditional professional competencies along with increasingly significant skills related to teaching and to the application of technology to library service - similar to the "data scientist" role advocated by Liz Lyon. Also mentions evidence-based practice.
3. Students and faculty will continue to demand increasing access to library resources and services, and to expect to find a rich digital library presence both in enterprise academic systems and as a feature of social computing.
4. Debates about intellectual property will become increasingly common in higher education, and resources and educational programming related to intellectual property management will become an important part of library service to the academic community.
5. The evolution of information technology will shape both the practice of scholarly inquiry and the daily routine of students and faculty, and demands for technology-related services and technology-rich user environments will continue to grow and will require additional funding. Mentions cyberinfrastructure (3 reports specifically: "To Stand the Test of Time: Long-term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering" (ARL, 2006); "Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Final Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences" (American Council of Learned Societies, 2006; "Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery" (National Science Foundation, 2007).
6. Higher education will be increasingly viewed as a business, and calls for accountability and for quantitative measures of library contributions to the research, teaching, and service missions of the institution will shape library assessment programs and approaches to the allocation of institutional resources.
7. As part of the "business of higher education," students will increasingly view themselves as "customers" of the academic library and will demand high-quality facilities, resources, and services attuned to their needs and concerns.
8. Online learning will continue to expand as an option for students and faculty – both on campus and off – and libraries will gear resources and services for delivery to a distributed academic community.
9. Demands for free, public access to data collected, and research completed, as part of publicly funded research programs will continue to grow.
10. The protection of privacy and support for intellectual freedom will continue to be defining issues for academic libraries and librarians.

The Research Committee also identified a number of emergent issues including:

• Library facilities and services will become increasingly integrated with research, teaching, and learning programs.
• The ability to meet the needs of e-science and e-scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities will increase and require new approaches to the design and delivery of core library services.
• The focus for academic libraries will shift from the creation and management of large, on-site library collections to the design and delivery of library services.
• The tools and techniques of social computing will provide new opportunities for the design and delivery of library resources and services, but will also make increasing demands on library staff and systems.
• Library patrons will use semantic Web search techniques to locate information resources

Harvard goes open access

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14arts-HARVARDRESEA_BRF.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

BiomedExperts

A new service from Collexis (free to individual researchers but not sure if there is a cost for institutions and research groups) which profiles researchers and promotes networking and collaboration. An interesting way of building on the social networking buzz, it seems to offer the ability to find researchers by expertise and visual representations of your own network of contacts. One weakness seems to be that profiles are built on recent publications, which might not give the whole picture, particularly ongoing work. I could see this working really well in something like UK Pubmed Central where you could add in the grant information to pull in the ongoing work.
http://www.biomedexperts.com/Portal.aspx

Reaction to NIH mandate

Feb's Internet Resources Newsletter reports on the NIH open access mandate and some of the fallout:

• US law makes public access of NIH funded research mandatory : http://www.knowledgespeak.com/newsArchieveviewdtl.asp?pickUpID=5317&pickUpBatch=804#5317
• New NIH research publication policy undermines intellectual property rights essential to science publishing, say Publishershttp://www.knowledgespeak.com/newsArchieveviewdtl.asp?pickUpID=5351&pickUpBatch=810#5351
• The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has expressed disappointment with the recent passage of legislation in the US. http://www.knowledgespeak.com/newsArchieveviewdtl.asp?pickUpID=5359&pickUpBatch=811#5359

CNI program 07-08

CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) in the US launched its program plan for 2007-08 at their recent meeting (http://www.cni.org/program/2007-2008/2007-2008-program.pdf). There are several references to eResearch:

"There is a renewed focus on campus infrastructure to support research programs. Developments include: policy, technical and economic influences that are leading to a partial re-centralization of computing functions; radically new high performance network and distributed computing technologies; a rethinking of storage functionality and economics; requirements for long-term data management, curation and preservation; and growing faculty demands for informatics support services. An additional dimension of these needs involves information and technology intensive collaborations among groups at multiple campuses (sometimes characterized as collaboratories or virtual organizations). Complementing the organizationally oriented work on e-research already described, CNI is also concerned with the institutional and cross-institutional rdevelopment of technical infrastructure, with a particular focus on large-scale storage and data management, and on collaboration tools and environments."

The idea of an Executive Roundtable is an interesting way to engage senior stakeholders:
"The Executive Roundtable assembles executive teams (usually the chief librarian and chief information technology officer) from about ten institutions for a focused two-to-three hour discussion of a specific topic of interest on the morning of the first day of the Task Force meeting. Past topics have included institutional repositories, learning management system strategies, identity management, learning spaces, funding innovation, and infrastructure to support research, which brought together vice presidents or vice provosts of research, in addition to the usual Roundtable organizational representatives from libraries and information technology."

"In the 2007-2008 program year CNI will continue to engage e-research developments both in the sciences and the humanities. The US National Science Foundation is launching major programs addressing data curation (the DataNet initiative, and also the Community-based Data Interoperability Networks program), and we will be highlighting these in our Task Force meetings."

"CNI is concerned with questions about availability of data related to scholarly work, and has been engaged in a number of discussions around open access, open science, and open data as they relate to this question, as well as discussions about disciplinary norms for data sharing. We will also continue to explore and document the ways in which data and computationally intensive scholarship are altering the nature of scholarly communication; the issues here include the legal and technical barriers to large-scale text and data mining; appropriate organizational, policy and technical strategies for linking articles and underlying data; and ways to construct scholarly works that are amenable to various combinations of human and machine use."

"As part of our ongoing exploration of the institutional implications of the emergence of e-science and e-research, we will continue to look at organizational and staffing questions. These include: how to appropriately combine and balance centralized and departmental support resources to most effectively support faculty and students; new information technology/library collaborations required by the e-research environment; and the staffing needs of data curation programs. In this endeavor we will work closely with ARL, where an e-science task force has recently mapped out a number of similar questions from a library perspective, and with the EDUCAUSE Cyberinfrastructure Task Force."

Awards

The World Economic Forum announced its list of Technology Pioneers 2008 (http://www.weforum.org/en/about/Technology%20Pioneers/SelectedTechPioneers/index.htm#IT) including Garlik, which is "the first company to develop a web-scale commercial application of semantic technology"; Wikimedia; and Imaginatik, which is developing collaborative spaces to explore ideas.

The Andrew W Mellon Foundation announced its Awards for Technology Collaboration (http://matc.mellon.org/winners/2007-matc-awardees-announced/) which "honor not‐for‐profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as cultural-heritage not‐for‐profit activities".

CNI task force meeting

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) task force meeting is going on this week. Several projects dealing with data are being discussed: http://www.cni.org/tfms/2007b.fall/project.html. One which is particularly relevant to work of eResearch team is Data-Cyberinfrastructure Collaboration at the University of California, San Diego:

"At the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the University Libraries are [...] working collaboratively with the San Diego Supercomputer Center to build an intersect of personnel, expertise, and services to provide long-term preservation of and access to research data that enables domain scientists and researchers to carry-out longitudinal complex data analysis to support interdisciplinary research. This critical partnership is providing new opportunities to the UCSD community and when linked with opportunities being developed for a University of California (UC) system-wide grid service platform, it will truly transform the way discovery and access intersect at UCSD and within the UC system."

Mandate for access to NIH research

In Research Information (Dec 07/Jan 08), the story "US Senate approves mandate for access to NIH Research". It will allow NIH to require, rather than request, researchers to make their NIH-funded research outputs publicly available via PubMed Central. Currently, less than 5% is deposited voluntarily.
http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=154

The Argo project

Mentioned on the BCS-KIDDM list this week, the ARGO project is interesting not only for the work it's doing in measuring vital information on our oceans, but in the way it is managing data. The real-time data are freely offered to anyone and can be downloaded from the web. The project involves around 30 countries including the UK (managed by the Met Office, with partners: the National Oceanography Centre, the British Oceanographic Data Centre and the UK Hydrographic Office). UK involvement is jointly funded by Defra, MoD and NERC.
http://www.argo.net/

OGF21 - interesting snippets

This time round OGF featured a Semantic Grid theme which I think was either missing or limited last time round as the Manchester event clashed with the WWW conference in Banff. There were a number of presentations on Web2.0 including:

• Savas Parastatidis from Microsoft talking about "the cloud" http://www.ogf.org/OGF21/materials/1031/2007.10.15%20-%20OGF%20-%20Web%202.0-Cloud%20Era%20and%20its%20Impact%20on%20how%20we%20do%20Research.pdf
• Dave de Roure talking about the JISC-funded myExperiment (VRE2) http://www.ogf.org/OGF21/materials/1030/OGF21myExperiment.ppt

And of course not forgetting the geospatial stuff...
http://www.gridforum.org/gf/event_schedule/index.php?id=960

OGF and OGC MoU

At OGF21, the OGF and OGC signed a Memorandum of Understanding. According to the OGF's Grid Connections Newsletter (Nov 07), the goals of the collaboration will include:
"1.) Integrate OGC's Web Processing Service (WPS) with a range of "back-end" processing environments to enable large-scale processing. The WPS could also be used as a front-end to interface to multiple grid infrastructures, such as TeraGrid, NAREGI, EGEE, and the UK's National Grid Service. This would be an application driver for both grid and data interoperability issues.
2.) Integration of WPS with workflow management tools. OGF’s SAGA draft standard is where multiple WPS calls could be managed.
3.) Integration of OGC Federated Catalogues/Data Repositories with grid data movement tools. OGF’s GridFTP is one possibility that supports secure, third-party transfers that are useful when moving data from a repository to a remote service.
However, the real goal is not just to do science, but to greatly enhance things like operational hurricane forecasting, location-based services, and anything to do with putting data on a map. WPS is just a starting point for the collaboration. As the two organizations engage and build mutual understanding of technical requirements and approaches, many other things will be possible. "

NIH funds research data sharing project

"Researchers at ICPSR have been awarded a two-year grant by the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project entitled, Barriers and Opportunities for Sharing Research Data. The project will investigate the extent of research data sharing in the social sciences and assess whether research data sharing is related to other aspects of the scientific process including scientific publication."
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ICPSR/org/announce.html

OGC News October 2007

Latest issue of OGC News has a couple of interesting links:

- info on and link to their Spatial Data Quality survey, which will inform the Spatial Data Quality Working Group's attempts to define a framework and grammar for the certification and communication of spatial data quality

- a slideshow demonstrating the use of OGC standards for earth observation.

SEASR

Thanks Frederique for pointing to this - Chris Mackie mentioned this in a meeting earlier in the year but I hadn't followed it up since...

http://www.seasr.org/

From their website:

"SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research) is being developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in cooperation with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

SEASR aims to:

• assist scholars in accessing and analyzing existing large information sources more readily and with greater refinement;
• give scholars increased portability of large information stores for on-demand computing; and
• empower collaboration among researchers by enhancing and innovating scholarly communities’ and their resources’ virtual research environments.

How will we do it? The SEASR development team will construct software bridges to move information from the unstructured and semi-structured data world to the structured data world by leveraging two well-known research and development frameworks: NCSA’s Data-To-Knowledge (D2K) and IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). SEASR will focus on developing, integrating, deploying, and sustaining a set of reusable and expandable software components and a supporting framework, benefiting a broad set of data-mining applications for scholars in the humanities.

SEASR’s technical goals include supporting:

• the development of a state-of-the-art software environment for unstructured data management and analysis of digital libraries, repositories and archives, as well as educational platforms; and
• the continued development, expansion, and maintenance of end-to-end software system: user interfaces, workflow engines, data management, analysis and visualization tools, collaborative tools, and other software integrated into a complete environment."

NSF calls

Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet)
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503141&org=OCI&from=home

Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI)
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503163&org=OCI&from=home

OGF and OGC

From OGF Grid Connections Oct 07 newsletter:

"In terms of user communities, OGF is pursuing a collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). OGC has a suite of tools for managing and presenting geospatial data -- anything that goes on a map -- and wants very much to extend their tools with the capability for distributed resource management, i.e., grids. I should also note that there is a Web 2.0 workshop at OGF-21 that covers social networking, semantic grids, and sensors. The fact that half of all Web 2.0 services registered at programmableweb.com are geospatially related, and that Google is sending KML through the OGC standardization rocess, indicates that there is a huge potential for grids in this arena. "

OGF21 is later this month - worth seeing what comes out of the following workshops:

Web 2.0 - features presentations on research and commercial applications of Web 2.0 technology including HPC, Cyberinfrastructure, Semantic Research, Social Networking
Geospatial - a collaboration with the OGC, covering topics such as grid-enabling the OGC's Web Processing Service and a NSF proposal on Community-based Data Interoperability Networks
GridNet2 - highlighting the work of the UK eScience at the OGF and in related standards bodies