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

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

Geospatial resources use in tertiary education: shaping the future

Last week, I attended a workshop organised and run by EDINA, as part of the eFramework workpackage of the SEE-GEO project. The aim of the workshop was to inform future planning and to begin thinking about how geospatial resources might work in a future world. We were asked to look ahead around 5 years - the general consensus was that we would be seeing an evolution rather than a revolution in that time e.g. ubiquity of geo info.

Opportunities and Challenges

Social/political/economic:

• economics of information - IPR; FoI; access and exploitation
• what about the knowledge that doesn't lend itself to a digital format?
• how to handle digital persona - virtual communities and alternative economies
• divisive nature of technology - a new division of class according to access to technology? does it disenfranchise or empower?

Technological

• standards and interoperability - impact of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo?
• how to manage fast paced change and multiple devices
• still a need to teach and train experts - geo experts will be needed, deeper learning for experts
• domination of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo - driving technology but have also helped put GI in mainstream
• data deluge
• protection/privacy/access/reuse
• embedding (what does embedding really mean?)

Research

• need an underlying basic IT infrastructure (e.g. grid, visualisation, mobile) with a spatial infrastructure (e.g. spatial ontologies) overlaid on top
• Google/Microsoft/Yahoo challenge - raises expectations; discourages sharing?; how well does it transfer to academia?
• methodologies - lack of skills here - mashups are not research; need to develop more analytical skills in young researchers
• data - integrity; interoperability; creation (new, repurposed); sharing
• policy - IPR; funding; publication; RAE/REF; tracking development of information
• collaboration - technological, social, learning with industry

Enablers

Data/Content

• Data is currently in layers and "all over the place"
• What will INSPIRE achieve?
• funding for infrastructure: interoperability; storage; distribution
• role of community generated data
• quality and validation
• semantic enrichment
• where does Google/Yahoo/Microsoft fit?
• Research Council mandates are not enforced
• how does a researcher deposit a dataset/database?
• depth/breadth tension

Tools/Technology

• there is a disconnect between creator and dataset - need provenance info - data/process broker, intelligent catalogue
• (web) services lead to fundamental changes in models of use e.g. do you need processing power alongside the data - remote processing
• "handy" mobile needed - portable, light, multiple ports, GPS, wearable
• sensor networks and notion of central storage
• tools/portals enable virtual world immersion - deeper sense of telepresence
• can we learn from games technology?
• consolidated and converged technologies
• collaboration and sharing - less travel?
• different publication needs - raw data; code; published papers

Skills, knowledge, people

• wider promotion of geo info
• compulsory GI education
• funders to encourage outputs to be disseminated
• policy framework
• repositories, portals, databases
• need for academic level specialist support
• career development
• professional development
• networks and communities of practice

Legal/policy

• funding for methodological development e.g. spatial methods for Grid
• copyright and intellectual property - derived data, watermarking, commercialisation
• training - cross-disciplinary; quality
• data and standards development - involving user communities
• ethics - code of practice; awareness of issues; data integrity; monitoring
• support - policy to encourage networking
• data access policy - feasibility and extent of info in public domain
• access/usage permissions - who has the right to grant permissions? authentication in a global context
• collaborative support - policy to enable multi-centre, multidisciplinary, multisector, multinational activity

Social/institutional/economic

• social software/networking tools
• wider dissemination of metadata beyond traditional subject boundaries
• cultural change to cite datasets
• links between universities and schools
• changing demography e.g. >adult learners
• funding - different streams - staffing, content, experimentation
• benefits - clear roles/responsibilities
• free or pay to view infrastructure
• alternative (i.e. to OS) providers now available
• entrepreneurial drivers
• REF/RAE should effectively recognise complex and hybrid digital outputs
• institutional or subject repositories
• nervousness about depositing material
• support to clear confusion re IPR especially in relation to derived data

There was some discussion about the role of JISC and its Geospatial Working Group so some messages to feed back.

Also, as an aside, I talked with Dr Douglas Cawthorne from De Montfort Uni in Leicester - they are involved in a large project to map Leicester - the result will be a multilayered map, showing the current city, the Roman city, social maps, emotive maps etc and will incorporate user generated content e.g. photos. Something to watch out for...

IT delivering value

Another interesting article on delivering value in Computing (15 May 08) - "Harnessing IT value" reporting on research at Cranfield which came up with 6 competencies that organisations should have if they want to deliver value through IT:
creating strategy

1. defining the information system contribution : translating strategy into processes, information and systems investments
2. exploiting information : to maximise benefits
3. defining the capability : long term planning of architecture and infrastructure
4. implementing solutions
5. delivering IT supply

JISC conference

Yesterday, the annual JISC conference took place in Birmingham - as usual, a very busy day and although I caught up with lots of people, I still managed to miss some of the people I was hoping to catch up with.

3 of my projects gave demos - 3DVisA, NaCTeM and ASSERT - and it was great to see the interest in the people attending. I went along to two parallel sessions: one on the Strategic eContent Alliance and one on rapid community building. Here are my notes from both...

The Strategic eContent Alliance aims to build a common information environment, a UK Content Framework and to gather case studies and exemplars. The UK Content Framework will be launched in March 2009 and will incorporate:

• standards and good practice
• advice, support, embedding
• policy, procedures
• service convergence modeling
• audit and register
• audience analysis and modeling
• exchange (interoperability) model development
• business models and sustainability strategies

There are a number of change agents to achieve the vision of the SCA...

• common licensing platforms
• common middleware
• digital repositories
• digitisation
• devolved administrations
• service convergence
• uk government policy review
• funding

Globally, there are other incentives e.g.

• service oriented architecture
• EU initiatives
• Google and Microsoft initiatives
• Open Content Alliance etc

The SCA has also engaged an IPR consultancy and Naomi Korn gave a brief overview of the issues of working in such a content-rich world. Naomi pointed out that it has never been easier to access content and referred to a number of key developments and standards to be aware of:

• Science Commons
• Digital Libraries i2010
• PLUS
• ACAP
• SPECTRUM (collections management)
• JISC registry of electronic licences
• Open Access Licensing initiatives

Simon Delafond from the BBC talked about the Memoryshare project which enables user-generated content to be recorded against a timeframe to create a national living archive. They plan to build on this project with the SCA to create Centuryshare to aggregate content and augment with user generated content - this will be a proof of concept project due to deliver in March 2009.

Meredith Quinn talked about the recent Ithaka report on sustainability. The paper tackles some of the cultural issues to be resolved to create the right environment for sustainability. Meredith outlined the 4 key lessons from this work:

1. rapid cycles of innovation are needed - i.e. don't be afraid to try new ideas and to drop ideas which aren't working
2. seek economies of scale - e.g. Time Inc required all their magazines to use the same platform - not such an easy task to achieve in the distributed nature of HE but maybe this is where shared services come in
3. understand your unique value to your user
4. implement layered revenue streams

The rapid community building workshop focused on the Users and Innovations programme and the Emerge community which has been set up to support the programme. Given the nature of the Web2.0 and next generation technologies this programme is dealing with, it was decided early on to adopt an agile and community-led approach. It was important to avoid imposing an understanding on the community and instead build a shared understanding across the community. So 80 institutions were brought together (some 200 individuals) face to face to start to build a community of practice - from there, the community developed further in an online environment, set up using Elgg.

The programme shared the success factors for community building:

• bounded openness
• heterogenous homophily
• mutable stability
• sustainable development
• adaptable model
• structured freedom
• multimodal identity
• shared personal repertoires
• serious fun

some of which are oxymorons! This is explained a little more at https://e-framework.usq.edu.au/users/wiki/UserCentredDevelopment. The approach is based on "appreciative enquiry" coined by Cooperrider and Srivastra in 1987.

It was interesting to hear their thoughts on benefits realisation which focuses on 3 strands:

• synthesis (of learning etc)
• capacity building
• increased uptake

The programme is also planning to create an Emerge Bazaar where projects can "share their wares" and offer services. This will also promote a kind of IdeasForge to encourage new activities which might lead to new funded projects. The Emerge Online conference is next week from 23 to 25 April.

As for the keynote sessions, key points from Lord Puttnam's speech were that we shouldn't try to solve problems with the same kind of thinking that caused them and that we are only scratching the surface of what we can achieve with technologies therefore should be more ambitious and keep innovation high on the agenda.

It was good to hear Ron Cooke highlight the data problem: "...my nightmare is the “challenge of super-abundant data” - not just its life cycle, but its superfluity with the new, unprecedented increases of data through Web 2.0 and user-generated content, including academic publishing in real time, blogging without control, and the quality and reliability of data. I am also concerned about the demands of skills it places on us - critical assessment is needed to deal with this data."

I missed Angela Beesley from Wikia but am pleased to see someone has summarised the talk http://librariesofthefuture.jiscinvolve.org/2008/04/15/jisc-conference-closing-keynote-speech-angela-beesley/ :-)

The SCA team have blogged the conference (far better than i have!) which you can read at http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/2008/04/15/.

The conference also saw the launch of the Libraries of the Future campaign (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/campaigns/librariesofthefuture.aspx).

Building Effective Virtual Organisations

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

UKDA-Store

"The UK Data Archive (UKDA) is launching UKDA-store, a new research output management tool, later this year. Used to submit data deposits into the UK Data Archive, UKDA-store is to be initially released to the social science research community with the intention of extending the system to other researchers. UKDA-store will enable researchers to submit a range of digital outputs to the self-archiving repository with the right to set permissions for individual and group access, so that data can remain private (on embargo) although metadata continues to be searchable. Furthermore, data that is judged to meet the UKDA’s acquisition criteria can be formally lodged for long-term central system preservation within the UK Data Archive. [...]
UKDA-store will be formally launched at the National Centre for Research Methods Festival on 30 June 2008 in Oxford."
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/02/ukdastore.aspx

Cloud tools used in NY Times digitisation

A short blog item (pointed out by Bill St Arnaud) on the use of Yahoo's Hadoop and Amazon's S3 and EC2 by the New York Times - cheaper infrastructure costs but the comments seem to suggest higher or equal coding costs. Interesting.
http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/2008/02/hadoop-ec2-s3-super-alternatives-for.html

NSF partnership with Google and IBM

The Cluster Exploratory (CluE) relationship will enable the academic research community to conduct experiments and test new theories and ideas using a large-scale, massively distributed computing cluster. NSF anticipates being able to support 10 to 15 research projects in the first year of the program, and will likely expand the number of projects in the future.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111186&govDel=USNSF_51
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071008_ibm_univ.html

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

JISC and research data

Research data gets a mention in latest JISC Inform:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/inform20.aspx#Turningthetide

A brief summary of recently commissioned work - hopefully to be followed up in more detail when the various studies start reporting...

New JISC briefing papers

Two new briefing papers:

• Research in the social sciences: an overview of JISC activities
  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/socialsciencesresearchv1.aspx
• Research in the biomedical sciences: an overview of JISC activities
  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/bioscienceresearchv1.aspx

This adds to the collection of briefing papers aimed at researchers:

• Research in the physical sciences: an overview of JISC activities http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/physicalsciencesresearchv1.aspx
• Research in the arts and humanities: an overview of JISC activities http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/artshumanitiesresearchv1.aspx

eInfrastructure programme meeting

Earlier this month, we organised a Programme Meeting, for new projects (funded through the Capital Programme) and existing projects. It was a great opportunity to get projects talking together and we need to think about what events will be useful in the future...

The presentations, notes and soon-to-be-uploaded audio available online here.

NeSC news Jan/Feb 08

Some interesting stories in the latest NeSC News (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/news/newsletter/January08.pdf):

• an overview of trust and security (to introduce the NeSC theme) which gives a good plain english account of the key issues
• an article on SciSpace (http://scispace.niees.group.cam.ac.uk/) a social networking application developed in Cambridge
• a news item on the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data

Good to see the viznet Showcase and JISC Conference getting a mention too ;-)

Grid in the news

National Grid Service supports 'virtual human' in HIV drug simulation from JISC Headlines:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/01/virtualhuman.aspx

"The combined supercomputing power of the JISC-funded UK National Grid Service and the US national grid has enabled UCL (University College London) scientists to simulate the efficacy of an HIV drug in blocking a key protein used by the lethal virus, it was announced today. The method – an early example of the Virtual Physiological Human in action – could one day be used to tailor personal drug treatments, for example for HIV patients developing resistance to their drugs."

Cloud and grid

Bill St Arnaud pointed to this useful blog by Ian Foster:
http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/theres-grid-in.html

Gives a good overview of some of the issues and adds to the debate of how new cloud computing actually is.

Cloud computing

Over the Christmas period, Bill St Arnaud posted a couple of interesting items on cloud computing. He also points to an excellent presentation by Savas Parastatidis. I'm not going to explain the background as the links here will do that much better than I can...

Advocates explain that cloud computing offers advantages over grid computing - clouds are potentially more powerful and crash-proof. And there is the idea that outsourcing the infrastructure can save institutions money and drive the environmental agenda.

The downsides associated with cloud computing include: immature standards (though this seems to be changing); inadequate access to high speed connections; data protection concerns.

The big players are all involved in cloud developments - Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo, Google, Amazon. Google is starting to work with a handful of US universities - University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Maryland - with a view to expanding later to work with more, globally. Amazon is already offering its Simple Storage Service (S3) and is developing its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The Wikipedia entry for cloud computing points to a couple of interesting articles:

• http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc20071116_379585.htm
• http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories which quotes Tony Hey on research clouds: "Tony Hey, vice-president for external research at Microsoft, says they'll function as huge virtual laboratories, with a new generation of librarians—some of them human—"curating" troves of data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials. Authorized users, he says, will build new tools, haul in data, and share it with far-flung colleagues. In these new labs, he predicts, "you may win the Nobel prize by analyzing data assembled by someone else."

News from ja.net

ja.net's December newsletter mentioned two launches relevant to eResearch:

Lightpath: "a centrally managed service which will help support large research projects on the JANET network by providing end-to-end connectivity. It includes the UKLight service for fine-grained circuit provision and extends it to include whole wavelengths across the JANET optical transmission infrastructure."

Aurora: "a dark-fibre network to support research on photonics and optical systems. It will interconnect research groups at the universities of Cambridge, Essex and UCL, with access to intermediate locations along each fibre path where additional equipment can be sited. This is a national facility funded for two years operation by HEFCE via JISC, and if projects require it, the JANET Lightpath service can provide circuits for use as an access mechanism to other locations on JANET, and also internationally."

http://www.ja.net/

Tony Hey's vision for eResearch

December's NeSC News features a write-up of a lecture given by Tony Hey in which he talks about the future direction of eResearch:

"Research today is data-intensive, compute-intensive, collaborative and multidisciplinary. Researchers are becoming "extreme information workers", looking for subtle signals in great volumes of data. Technologies are emerging that enable a step change in handling scientific data: visualisation, analysis and processing, and also data management and preservation.

Where we have failed, so far, is in making it as easy to use the technology for handling these challenges as it is to use the web. Some communities, like particle physicists, are quite happy with technically complex middleware, but most are unwilling to work with these sorts of tools.
The new technologies of the social web may be the key to empowering researchers in the new data-centric world. It’s already happening in some communities. [...]

Beyond the lab, academic publishing is on the verge of a revolution. [...]

In the new world of e-Research, everything is connected in the cloud – the web-based applications and data stores out there in the internet. There will increasingly be services and tools in the cloud, accessed through simple interfaces via a web browser. [...]"

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."