The OeRC Project Management Symposium, which aimed to explore the processes and tools used when managing e-Science projects, took place on 10-11 April. This event originated from the EPSRC funded project Embedding e-Science Applications: Designing Managing for Usability. Nearly 30 participants attended and there were 11 good quality presentations (including keynote speeches) and two good discussions.

Project management is gaining increasing importance in e-Research because many e-Research projects involve inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary collaboration. A good project manager will facilitate the communication between different partners, making sure the collaboration stays on track and generates useful results. A member of my discussion group used the term ‘step-parent’ to describe the role of project managers – in that you don’t have the real power (as the PI has the authority) but need to make sure things go well.

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Ricardo Gacitua, a PhD student at the Computing Department at Lancaster University, gave a presentation about a tool named ‘OntoLancs’ he has been developing at NCeSS today. OntoLancs provides a protocol that enables different Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to be compared, plug-in-ed, assembled, integrated. This allows researchers to customise/personalise a research tool for themselves.

Ricardo’s presentatoin led me to ponder many questions particularly in current social scientific studies:

1) To be able to create a usable and useful workflow, researchers need to be aware of the existence of different techniques, and their pros and cons. At the moment, most researchers are customed to a limited range of software tools. This ought to be changed if researchers were to sensibly choose their favourite techniques and defend for the motivation behind the selection of these techniques.

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Pascal found this on Scientific American:

Science 2.0 — Is Open Access Science the Future?  Is posting raw results online, for all to see, a great tool or a great risk?

The 7th International Symposium on Grid Computing took place in Taipei from 7th to 11th of April 2008. It was attended by 228 participants from 27 different countries (you can see most of them in the group photo). The event kicked off with a number of tutorials and workshops, e.g., on the gLite middleware or the iRODS as well as meetings by different working groups (I will report on the EUAsiaGrid kick-off meeting in another post to this blog).

The programme contained a nice mixture reports on technological developments, the progress of Grid applications as well as the status of service provision and uptake in Asia. As part of the applications strand, Tobias Blanke from the Arts & Humanities e-Science Support Centre and myself chaired a session on Humanities and Social Sciences. (more…)

The IEEE has reaffirmed the LOM (Learning Object Metadata) as a standard, and will be working to update it.  The update will be needed to allow closer integration with other metadata standards.

But do we need it at all?

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I participated in the annual JISC conference at Birmingham International Convention Centre on 15 April. The event was well-organised (good catering and good facility) and well-attended (the organiser estimated more than 700 delegates attending plus online participants). And it was a great opportunity to meet old friends and make new contacts.

I paid particular attention to three themes at this conference: Free/Open Source Software, Web 2.0, and user/community engagement.

In his opening speech, Sir Ron Cooke, Chair of JISC, spoke highly of free/open source software and its cultural (open access, open content), educational, economic, technical, and (most interestingly) environmental implications. And JISC has been invested a lot in promoting free/open source software through funding services (e.g., OSS-Watch and JISC-Legal) and projects (e.g., MyExperiment).

The Hub’s current research on understanding the development process of MyExperiment is parallel to JISC’s focus on free/open source software in that MyExperiment is an open source software project. After my presentation at the OeRC Project Management Workshop, Gabriel Hanganu and Ross Gardler from OSS-Watch have shown interest in knowing more about how we do analysis of the qualitative instant messaging data as most of the free/open source software projects use instant messaging tools (e.g., IRC, Jabber, ICQ, Skype) to communicate with distributed members.

User engagement/community building is another important item on JISC’s roadmap. Both Sir Cooke and Lord Puttnam have emphasised the importance of engaging users and harnessing the growing user-generated content on the web. Web 2.0, in this case, is ‘the’ critical means. This JISC conference, for the first time, allowed those unable to attend to follow the conference online through a number of web activities, including live streaming of keynote sessions, micro-blogging (via ‘Twitter’), shared images of the conference, live blogging, and podcasts of interviews and sessions. Angela Beesley‘s closing keynote on Wikipedia provided insight about how a good Web 2.0 project works. And in the afternoon parallel session that I participated on ‘VRE – Into the future’, the advantages of Web 2.0 such as harnessing collective intelligence and engaging the public/citizen have again been strengthened.

However, there are concerns about the Web 2.0 phenomenon – Sir Cooke mentioned of students lack of analytical skills for selecting good online contents, David De Roure spoke of his approach of balancing Grid and Web 2 technologies, IPRs and copyright issues, technical standards issue, etc. These all await us to explore in more details. I shall also mention that the Hub’s reputation of delivering quality user/usability studies has been spreading (thanks to David De Roure).

Apart from hearing a range of speakers give presentations, I also watched the demonstrations from CREW, NaCTeM and the ASSERT project, and visited some stands in the exhibition hall (e.g., NGS, Intute, NaCTeM, OSS-Watch).

To sum up, I think the JISC conference is a great opportunity to meet people. In terms of conference organisation, one thing worth learning is to enable people to fllow our NCeSS conference online through live video streaming, live feeds and networking sites.

I look forward to the JISC 2009 conference which will take place at Edinburgh in March 2009.

Two meetings were held on 16^th April in Amsterdam that brought together researchers with interests in developing, applying and reflecting on digital methods and e-social science research. The first meeting was conveyed by Professor Richard Rogers and held at The Digital Methods Initiative (Media Studies, University of Amsterdam). The second was hosted by the Virtual Knowledge Studio (International Institute of Social History) and chaired by Andrea Scharnhorst, Senior Research Fellow.

The meetings explored issues in methodological development and research practices, and aimed to highlight areas of convergence and possible common research interests and collaborations. The meetings, which were organised by Dr Ruth McNally at the ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen, UK), discussed applications and methodologies to support CESAGen’s study of the biosciences and of genomic technologies, but also looked at e-research and digital methods more generally and from the reflexive perspective of Science and Technology Studies.

During the course of the day experience of various tools and their visualisation, and of specific case studies was shared. The notion that tools may embed a specific methodology(-ies) from within, whilst being portrayed as ‘neutral’ and ‘adaptable tools’ for any discipline was discussed at length, and so was the idea that certain tools ought to be co-developed with users from the start, rather than being first developed and then passed on to users to apply (even if with modifications). The work of the Digital Methods Initiative group and of Govcom.org Foundation suggests that the methodology embedded in a tool can be presented in a very explicit and formalised way, by openly adopting a specific methodology as the starting point for developing a tool.

Further discussion centred on both studying ‘digitally native’ data, including traces left on the web, and the challenges this may pose, as well as the need to investigate further whether this data requires new methods or whether it can be accommodated in existing epistemiologies and made sense of through existing ontologies.

The meetings were attended by research groups at DMI, the Govcom.org Foundation, VKS, CESAGen and also by Elisa Pieri (ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science, UK), Matthijs den Besten (Oxford Internet Institute, UK) and Peter Stegmaier (Centre for Society and Genomics, Netherlands).

2008 Sakai Community Conference will be held in Paris, France. The dates will be Tuesday-Thursday, 1-3 July, with pre- and post-conference sessions and activities on Monday, 30 June and Friday, 4 July.  More details available at

https://sakai.educonference.com/paris/index.php

1. Overview

The workshop of “The Application-Led Security Agenda for e-Science” which is the first workshop in association with eSI Thematic Programme – Trust and Security in Virtual Communities, was held from 05 March 2008 11:00AM – 06 March 2008 03:00PM at e-Science Institute at Edinburgh. This workshop was organized by Andrew Martin from Oxford University. (more…)

The first workshop of the theme identified Usability and Interoperability of authentication and authorization schemes as among the biggest bariers to take-up of eScience technologies. The objective of this workshop is to explore this area in greater depth: to understand the state-of-the-art, share best practice, and develop directions for furture work.

This workshop will be in Oxford e-Research Centre, 8th&9th May. Details available at

http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/885/