collaborative science: technologies & examples

Collaborative Science: Technologies & Examples

Cameron KiddleResearch Fellow, Grid Research Centre (GRC)

University of Calgary

Outline Technologies

Web 2.0/Social Networking Motivation Examples

Academia.edu, Sciweavers, myExperiment, HUBzero

Examples GRC is working on GeoChronos, CyberSKA, WaterCloud

Cybera Summit Sep. 22, 2010

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Web 2.0 – “The Social Web” Aimed at:

Providing feature rich user environments Making it easier for users to generate Web content Improving online social connectivity

Web 2.0 technologies Blogs/Microblogs (WordPress, TypePad, Twitter) Wikis (Wikipedia) Mashups (HousingMaps, ChicagoCrime) Widgets/Gadgets (iGoogle, Netvibes) Social networks (Facebook, MySpace)

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Social Networking Personal

Business

Academic

White label


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Social Networking Motivation Can enhance collaboration capabilities

around data and applications – “Facebook for Scientists”

Facebook Widely adopted People: > 500 million users (50% log on to Facebook

on any given day), average user has 130 friends Data: > 30 billion pieces of content shared each

month Applications: > 550 thousand applications on

Facebook Platform


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Academia.edu Search for others

based on research interests, institution, department, position

Follow work of others (via news feed)

Share your own publications, presentations, research interests


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Sciweavers (www.sciweavers.org)

Bookmarking network Aimed at promoting

research work and researcher visibility

Share links to presentations, notes, source code, datasets, etc.


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myExperiment (www.myexperiment.org) Developed at

Universities of Southampton, Manchester and Oxford

Share scientific workflows and other research objects

Contacts, groups, tagging, rating, reviews, comments


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HUBzero (hubzero.org) A collaborative platform for

scientists developed at Purdue University

Recently released as open source (spring 2010)

Share publications, presentations, courses, seminars

Groups, wikis, blogs, ratings, citations, tagging, …

On-line, interactive access to tools/applications

Supports over 20 hubs nanoHUB.org,

pharmaHUB.org, thermalHUB.org, …


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GeoChronos (geochronos.org) CANARIE NEP-I

Project Partners

CANARIE, UofA, Cybera, UofC (GRC)

On-line collaborative portal for Earth observation scientists

Aimed at enabling sharing of scientific data and applications


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GeoChronos - Collaboration Social networking portal

Elgg-based (elgg.org)

Social networking services Blogs Tags Media/document sharing Wikis Friends/contacts Groups Discussions Message boards Calendars Status Activity Feeds


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GeoChronos – Interactive Application Service On-line, on-demand

access to scientific applications

Share application sessions and data with other users

Access control to applications

Hosted on top of a cloud computing platform that can dynamically provision resources on-demand


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GeoChronos – Spectral Libraries Store, share and

browse spectral data Manage metadata for

spectra Create and share

metadata schemas View spectral plots,

metadata, ancillary files and maps


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GeoChronos – MODIS Workflows Creation/execution/monitoring of

workflows (mosaic, reprojection and subsetting of MODIS satellite data)

Upload or selection of shapefile/region of interest

Selection of data products Extraction of quality control

information Thumbnail generation for output

files for viewing/verification of data

Browsing of MODIS and workflow output data/metadata from workflows via same data management system developed for Spectral Library


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GeoChronos – Next Steps Development/integration of additional

collaboration tools/plugins Generalization of data management system

to support other data types (other satellite data, flux and phenology tower data, meteorological data, ...)

Distributed data management Employ Semantic Web technologies to

better link/relate data and enable ontological mapping of metadata from different schemas


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CyberSKA (www.cyberska.org) CANARIE NEP-II Project Partners

CANARIE, Cornell, Cybera, IBM Canada, McGill, NRC, UBC, UBCO, UofC (Physics/GRC)

On-line collaborative portal for radio astronomers

Aimed at addressing evolving science needs of future radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be largest radio-telescope when completed


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CyberSKA - Collaboration Social networking portal

Elgg-based (elgg.org) Initially adapted from

GeoChronos with significant development/customization since



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CyberSKA - Visualization Recognition of FITS

Mime Type In-line display of FITS

headers On-line visualization of

FITS files Interactive panning and

zooming Histogram correction Color map adjustment Display data values for

each pixel


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CyberSKA – Data Access Access/download

multi-dimensional FITS data

Select region of interest, stokes parameters, channel range and width

Requested data generated on virtualized Condor Pool


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CyberSKA – Next Steps Development/integration of additional

collaboration tools/plugins Develop distributed data management system

Have an initial iRODS-based prototype Establish cloud environments at each site Develop Facebook-like third party application API Establish a framework for users to integrate data

processing and analysis tools/algorithms they have developed

Improve scalability of on-line visualization toolCybera Summit Sep. 22, 2010

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WaterCloud Cybera Pilot Project Partners

Alberta Advanced Education and Technology, Alberta WaterSMART, Cybera, Tesera Systems Inc, UofC (GRC)

Aimed at exploring use of cloud services to store, manipulate and expose data related to water management


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WaterCloud - Collaboration Social networking portal

Elgg-based (elgg.org)



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WaterCloud – Visualization Tool Map for displaying

and selecting monitoring stations to analyse data for

Manage monitoring stations and collections

Select and plot data


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WaterCloud – Collection Management Save a set of monitoring

stations and affiliated descriptions, date ranges and data types as a collection

Share collections with other contacts, groups, or make public

Load previous saved/shared collections for instant data analysis


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WaterCloud – Next Steps Employment of Semantic Web

technologies to better link data of different types and better automate analysis of data

Explore different ways for visualizing and integrating data in a meaningful way

Explore value added services for processing and analysing data


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Contact Information

Cameron [email protected]://pages.cspc.ucalgary.ca/~kiddlec/

http://geochronos.org/[email protected]

http://grid.ucalgary.ca/

CyberSKA http://www.cyberska.org/[email protected]