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

Various news

I'm starting to catch up with reading - here's some of the news to hit recently (ish!):

• Microsoft buys up Powerset, in its attempt to take on Google
• HEFCE announces 22 pilot institutions to test the new REF (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402609)
• NHS Choices selects Capita as preferred bidder
• Google is experimenting with a Digg-like interface
• Amazon S3 experienced service outage on 20 July - one of the risks of relying on the cloud, I guess
• Encyclopaedia Britannica goes wiki
• Proquest to acquire Dialog business from Thomson Reuters
  

Some interesting articles came my way too...

• Information : lifeblood or pollution? has some interesting thoughts about when information has value and when there is so much information it loses its value. Jakob Nielsen is quoted: 'Information pollution is information overload taken to the extreme. It is where it stops being a burden and becomes an impediment to your ability to get your work done.' Possible solutions are rating the integrity of information and clearer provenance.
• International initiative licenses resources across 4 European countries about a deal negotiated via the Knowledge Exchange with Multi-Science, ALPSP, BioOne, ScientificWorldJournal, and Wiley-Blackwell.
• A fun way of describing the amount of data Google handles

Dangers of the cloud

Yep, still reading back through Bloglines (having a bit of a spring clean!) and came across a piece from Bill Thompson on the dangers of the cloud - funnily enough, had a similiar conversation at a meeting last week...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7421099.stm

Projects addressing issues around research data

Yesterday, we had a meeting here at JISC to bring together current projects working in the field of research data. There's a lot happening and it's going to be really interesting to see what comes out of these studies:

• UK Research Data Service feasibility study which is funded by HEFCE to explore options for creating a shared service for managing research data


• Data Audit Framework project to enable institutions to find out what data they hold, where it's located, who's responsible for it and how to share with other institutions


• A number of case studies to test the Data Audit Framework


• A study exploring the skills, role and career development of "data scientists" and curators


• A study exploring the costs to institutions of preserving research data, to report within next few weeks


• A summer school to be organised by the DCC on curation skills


• The DISC-UK DataShare project building on a support network to promote sharing


• The forthcoming study funded by RIN/JISC/NERC on publication


• DCC's work, notably the Research Data Management Forum; the Lifecycle Model; SCARP; Store

I already mentioned (http://ali-stuff.blogspot.com/2008/02/jisc-and-research-data.html) an article earlier this year in Inform. Of course, much of the work stems from Liz Lyon's report from last year Dealing with Data (see earlier post at http://ali-stuff.blogspot.com/2007/11/data-sharing.html)

NGS and data storage

The March NeSC newsletter (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/news/newsletter/March08.pdf) features a short item on NGS focusing on storage, referring to their work with SDSS:

"One example of where the NGS is assisting with large data sets is the Sloan Digital Sky Project (SDSS; www.sdss.org). It already uses the NGS in order to simultaneously access two large databases containing images of nearly 300 million celestial objects. The relational data bases in the UK and US hold over 100 parameters for each object therefore difficulties with storage and access were inevitable. Helen Xiang at the University of Portsmouth has been using the Oracle databases hosted on the NGS to store the data and recently succeeded in transferring almost 2 Terabytes of SDSS data to the NGS Oracle database in Manchester. A separate Microsoft SQL database at Portsmouth holds another 2 Terabytes of similar data and joint queries on the two databases have been successfully run. Not only did the SDSS solve the problems of data storage but they also solved the problem of a large number of users being able to access the data from wherever they were based. "

Google and data storage

Back in January, Wired reported (http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.html) on Google's plans for open access to research data:

"Two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project"

Also refers to an earlier article by Thomas Goetz (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-10/st_essay) on freeing dark data i.e. negative results, to get around the publication bias problem.

Google to offer data storage

"Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data"
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.html