Mashups

Interesting sites:

Mashup Dashboard http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups

Repositories Mashup http://maps.repository66.org/

Simile Timeline http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/

Grid and Web2.0

Article on Bill St Arnaud's blog on grid and web2.0

http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-web-20-needs-grid-computing.html

NSF call for community-based data interoperability networks

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=502112&org=OCI&from=home

"Digital data are increasingly both the products of research and the starting point for new research and education activities. The ability to re-purpose data – to use it in innovative ways and combinations not envisioned by those who created the data – requires that it be possible to find and understand data of many types and from many sources. Interoperability (the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged) is fundamental to meeting this requirement. This NSF crosscutting program supports community efforts to provide for broad interoperability through the development of mechanisms such as robust data and metadata conventions, ontologies, and taxonomies."

Guidance on bid writing

From JISC's eLearning Focus pages : http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/bidwriting

Unbundling Windows

From BCS News -
"PCs sold in the European Union (EU) should not come with an operating system already installed on them, according to a new report. The publication created by the Globalisation Institute and submitted to the European commission (EC) suggests that it is not in the interests of consumers to keep selling systems that are bundled with Windows."
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.14659

eBank report

Thanks to the UKOLN newsfeed for pointing out a new report from the eBank project - A Study of Curation and Preservation issues in the eCrystals Data Repository and proposed federation. Now in its 3rd phase, eBank is exploring preservation, curation and sustainability issues, with a view to progressing a federation of repositories in crystallography, thus ensuring data remains usable (and reusable by others).

Some of the specific issues considered in the report are:

• Audit and certification: including a brief overview of recent work and current instruments. The recommendation is to use the lightweight version of the DRAMBORA toolkit due this month, as part of an annual self-audit cycle. It is acknowledged that short-term staff contracts and funding cycles have a detrimental effect on the organisational aspects which need to be in place to ensure sustainability. A further recommendation is to explore LOCKSS or CLOCKSS "to engage the crystallography community in the preservation of its valuable data"
• Open Archival Information System (OAIS) standard: the report recommends eBank develop a formal deposit, ingest, validation and dissemination policy and that work on Representation Information looks wider than just the eCrystals repository but looks at the whole crystallography domain
• Metadata: The report recommends further exploration of provenance information as currently versioning is the only type of information stored; and also how preservation metadata can be generated, extracted and maintained automatically

CNI news

News from the CNI points to the following interesting items this week :

CODATA Data Science journal - "Open Data for Global Science"
http://dsj.codataweb.org/special-open-data.html

CT Watch Aug 07 - "The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications and Cyberinfrastructure"
http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/