Observation Support Concept

A System for Research Collaboration

http://www.stormbourne.comJeff Mitchell

I have a concept for an on-line research collaboration system. I envision this concept creating a highly interconnected network of researchers, volunteers and facilities. My goal is to enlist the help of domain experts and scientist in the final design phase of this system. By focusing on what is possible for such a system, I hope to inspire this engagement.

How Can I Help?One possible way I can contribute is to provide a

workflow solution. This solution could allow a deep level of coordination among researchers, volunteers, and facilities. It could also provide interoperability solutions for dissimilar software systems and data

sources.

System Goals• Facilitate Communication

• Increase visibility of lines of research to the public and the observation and research community.

• Remove barriers to participating in projects that could benefit from volunteers, or a wider base of professional researchers.

• Provide equipment coordination and computational support through interface standardization

• Use the power of a “research network” to uncover new insights and relationships among research projects

Facilitate Communication

• Provide a single point of focus for a project’s status.

• Quickly identify relationships between projects so that duplicate efforts can be identified.

• Provide very detailed chronological records of events and discoveries.

• Allow a principal researcher quickly promote the urgency of a given task or subproject to the projects network.

We need to make sure that we reduce the on-boarding work for the principal research team so that volunteer’s contributions result in a net gain in productivity. Also the most valuable volunteers are most likely very busy individuals as well and the quicker they can become productive the better. This system should create an efficient on-ramp so that the forward progress of a project isn’t hampered by the merging of new participants with the project.

Remove Barriers to Participation

• Would allow prospective volunteers to watch and learn before attempting to contribute.

• Knowledge transfer to the project’s network becomes a force multiplier for the researcher.

• Education and on-boarding materials are continually improved by the network.

• The network begins to take on the tasks associated with making new members productive

These next two areas are where I feel this system concept differentiates itself from content management systems or Wiki’s, which are already being used to some degree to fulfill the first two goals though not in the detail and volume I envision for this system. This next goal involves providing a gateway for data and numerical analysis. Especially in cases where there may be no public gateway at all. JPL Horizons or the Minor Planet Center’s web portal have great access, but I can guess that not all facilities having data relevant to an observation project or have available computational power have this type of interface. So a simplified way to provide that should be beneficial.

Provide Computational Support

• Provide a framework in which “manual” computations can be performed, commonly formatted, aggregated and vetted by the research project’s network participants.

• Harness the untapped computational powers of the idle desktop or even an entire idle data center. One method might be Internet scale clustering through message passing interfaces. Another method would be simply grabbing a dataset, operating on a dataset, returning a standardized result set.

• Provide project integration points or gateways to existing systems containing data that might of use but otherwise have no public interface.

• Achieved partially through simple and standardized application programming interfaces (API) or domain specific languages (DSL).

Graph databases represent an alternate way for a software system to persist data that uses attributes of data objects to create connections or paths to other data. It’s widely used by social networking platforms to connect people but I propose to use it to expose new connections among research, ideas, facilities and discoveries. You are exposed to this technology daily. This technology is currently being used to create a profile of you based on things like what you typically purchase and what you search for on the internet. These attributes are used to predict things like whether a credit card transaction is fraudulent, or what ads to show you. Its one of my personal missions to use graph database technology to a greater degree in scientific research.

Harness the Power of the Network Graph

• This system would have a research project centered focus instead of an individual person focus as in a social networking platform.

• Would use graph database technologies to reveal relationships between research that might have gone unnoticed with the widely used Wiki approach.

• The content would be massively searchable. Posts even down to the random “musing” on a subject will start to generate a collective insight.

How would one start to use a system like this?

We’ll start by identifying some likely users of this type of system, the “Actors”, and we’ll list some of their attributes. Then I’ll give two sample use cases or “user stories”.

I like to use a software engineering technique that involves storyboarding. At a high level this mimics the same process that scenes from a screenplay are laid out in a movie to lay out how a user will interact with this system. So far what I’ve laid out are like props, locations and action that are available to us perhaps. Now let’s look at some of the attributes of a few of the people that might participate in such a system, they are called actors in this design methodology. Leveraging graph technology, these attributes will be how researchers will intersect with volunteers or other professionals doing similar work and vice versa.

The Actors

• Researcher Needing follow-up or confirmation

• Researcher needing access to data or insight on what other similar projects exist.

• Volunteer Observer

• Volunteer Research Assistant

A Researcher has a Profile

• Areas of specialization

• Current projects

• primary focus

• access to facilities

• past publications

A Volunteer has a Profile

• Areas of interest

• Relevant skills

• Availability (commitment level)

• Past history (recommendations perhaps?)

• Relevant equipment

Researcher Starts a Project

• The project could descend from parents i.e. Asteroid Observation Program >> Orbital Certainty Projects >> (new Project) P-1087-TH Observation.

• Project is tagged with interest areas, skills required, equipment required etc.

• A list of potential volunteers and researchers materializes to the researcher as well as similar research projects

• The researcher can begin building a network around this project.

(An example user story)

The project is really the central character. Examples of a project might be orbital characterization of a single near earth object, or the development of a new technique or observation pattern. Here are some of the attributes that may create the connection between projects.

The Project• It’s not exactly an actor but it’s the central focus of

the system.

• It has a subject or series of subjects.

• It has participants.

• It has ever growing content contributions from simple status posts to detailed calculations and beyond.

• It has interfaces to necessary systems and data sources.

• It likely descends from a broader project.

(The Main Character)

A Volunteer is Notified

• The P-1087-TH Observation project intersects this volunteers profile to some degree.

• The volunteer can see the requirements and similar research projects.

• Volunteer notifies the researcher of an intent to join the projects network or moves on to the next notification.

(Another example user story)

Where does the story go from here?

• It’s up to observation professionals to see merit in this and help me finish the story.

• I have the pieces and parts, need domain expert input to help identify the integration points.

• Basically, you, me and a white board.

The Pieces and Parts

System Life Cycle• I plan to develop to a minimum level of functionality based on interviews

of active experts, then let community voting drive further development.

• Web based architecture allows for Continuous deployment and integration.

• Portal exists for defect reports and management.

• Highly available and scalable architecture.

• No ads.

• To keep the system funded I would seek some revenue through directed integrations, providing infrastructure for funded research and specialized commercial implementations.

Closing

I hope I’ve given you enough of a picture of what is possible in such a system to generate some interest. I would be very happy expand further. In short and staying with the storyboarding principle I referenced earlier, I need help from leaders and experts in the observation field to build the detailed story points of this system.

More Info• About me –

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffmitchell

• Contact me – jeffm@stormbourne.com

• About my company – http://www.stormbourne.com

• please contact me if you are interested. Thank You.