CIRSS

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Data sharing, small science, and institutional repositories. UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, December 7-9, 2009, Oxford, UK. First author: Melissa H. Cragin; co-authors: Marina Kogan, Jacob R. Carlson, Michael Witt.

Melissa Cragin will be presenting Data sharing: small science, and institutional repositories on Wednesday, December 9^th, 2009 at the meeting.

The All-Hands Meeting has become the annual event where computational scientists and technologists can come together to share, discuss and advance the exciting research that has grown out of the e-Science Programme.

Traditionally a September event,  the AHM has moved to December to coexist with the IEEE e-Science meeting, giving us the opportunity to bring the UK community together with the international leaders in e-Science.

We are happy to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services Digital Collections and Content project has joined Flickr! Our first set of photographs  from Flora (IL) Public Librarys Charles Overstreet Collection  has been uploaded to the photosharing portal as part of the Flickr Feasibility Study (pdf), an IMLS DCC initiative that began this summer with the goal of increasing the availability and exposure of rare, historical photos in the IMLS-funded collections that we have aggregated. We will continue with regular uploads of photographs from a variety of collections, so keep checking our photostream; we welcome tags and comments.

The Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive approximately $2.9 million dollars as a partner on the Data Conservancy project, a $20 million initiative led by the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries. The five-year award, one of the first two in the NSF's DataNet program, will build
infrastructure for the management of the ever-increasing amounts of digital research data. The principal investigator is Sayeed Choudhury, Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center, and associate dean of university libraries, at Johns Hopkins. The sub-award to the University of Illinois is led by co-principal investigator, Carole L. Palmer, director of CIRSS and professor at GSLIS. Other CIRSS researchers include Melissa Cragin, Allen Renear, John MacMullen, and David Dubin from GSLIS, and Michael Welge from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

The project will begin with data from astronomy, the life sciences, earth sciences, and social sciences, developing a framework to more fully understand data practices currently in use, and arrive at a model for curation that allows ease of access both within and across disciplines. "Science and engineering research and education are increasingly digital and data-intensive," said Choudhury, "which means that new management structures and technologies will be critical to accommodate the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and streams. The potential for the sharing and application of data across disciplines is incredible. But it's not enough to simply discover data; you need to be able to access it and be assured it will remain available."

The Illinois team will contribute to multiple aspects of the project, conducting studies of scientists' data practices and needs, and analyzing how best to represent complex units of data in the repository. "We will be conducting a systematic analysis of the data curation requirements across the disciplines served by the Data Conservancy," said Palmer. "Our primary interest is in the 'long tail of small science,' and how to support collecting and sharing of the highly variable types of data produced by individual scientists and small research groups. Our results will determine data curation and preservation requirements but also policies to guide how the Data Conservancy and other large, cross-disciplinary data repositories are developed and used." The research led by Renear will develop formal terminology and identity conditions for fundamental data concepts. "Many of the key cross-cutting concepts of scientific data organization remain poorly defined," said Renear. "Our work will provide the foundation for standardizing how Data Conservancy datasets are identified, described, related, and organized."

The CIRSS research activities and other Data Conservancy efforts will feed directly into two professional training programs at GSLIS, the Data Curation specialization in the master's of library and information science and the Biological Information Specialists master's in the campus-wide bioinformatics program. The award will also support professional development in data curation principles, processes, and technologies.

Allen Renear, GSLIS Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research, will be presenting Strategic reading and scientific discourse at the Workshop on Semantic Web Applications in Scientific Discourse. 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), October 25-29, Washington, DC.

Please join us on October 28th from 12:30-2:00 in 341 LIS for the next e-Research Roundtable (ERRT). John Unsworth (GSLIS) and Loretta Auvil (NCSA) will be leading the informal discussion on the Metadata for Web 2.0 software marketplace. The Mellon Foundation is interested in supporting the sharing of web services and academic software widgets, and they would like SEASR (the NCSA software environment for advancement of scholarly research) to be able to keep track of whose web services, software widgets, etc. are being used, by whom, in order that some system of professional credit and/or a system of exchange of value could be developed across the universities whose faculty and staff contribute to the system.  This has a near-term practical possibility of implementation, as part of Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/). 

The recommended reading is the current draft of the Bamboo Implementation proposal, particularly section 4, "Areas of Work": available at https://wiki.projectbamboo.org/display/BPUB/BIP+Discussion+Draft+v0.6

Metadata roundtable group is meeting tomorrow, October 21st, from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, in Rm. 341 at GSLIS, to discuss the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) standard and its applications. Tim Cole, Jerry McDonough, and Richard Urban will lead our discussion. The list of background readings is posted to the Metadata roundtable webpage.
Please share this announcement with anyone who might be interested in the topic. Everyone is welcome to attend and participate in discussion.

Please join us on October 7th from 12:30-2:00 in 242 LIS for the next e-Research Roundtable (ERRT).  Anita Bandrowski (NIF, UCSD)  will be leading an informal discussion on the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) Resource Registry and Ontology.

A description of this session and a list of suggested background readings can be found at the ERRT Web page.

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Title:  Modeling and Design of Scientific Workflows with Data Assembly Lines, Provenance, and Semantic Types

Date:  Monday, September 21st

Time:  11:00 AM

Location:  LIS 126

Abstract:   Despite an increasing interest in scientific workflow technologies in recent years, workflow design remains a challenging, slow, and often error-prone process, thus limiting the speed of further adoption of scientific workflows. Based on practical experience with data-driven workflows, we identify and illustrate a number of recurring scientific workflow design challenges, i.e., parameter-rich functions; data assembly, disassembly, and cohesion; conditional execution; iteration; and, more generally, workflow evolution. In the second part of the talk, we discuss related workflow research issues, i.e., the importance of provenance and data lineage in scientific workflows and the use of logic-based semantic types in workflow design.

See http://cirss.lis.illinois.edu/BertramLecture.html  for an extended abstract.

Bertram Ludaescher is professor at the Department of Computer Science and a member of the faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center, both at the University of California, Davis. His research focus includes modeling, design, and optimization of scientific workflows and databases, data and workflow provenance, and knowledge representation and reasoning for scientific workflows and scientific data integration. He is currently involved in several collaborative scientific data and workflow management projects, including the DOE Scientific Data Management (SciDAC/SDM) Center project and NSF projects to develop scientific workflow technology (Kepler-CORE), e.g., for bioinformatics and environmental observatory applications (REAP, COMET). Prof. Ludaescher received his M.S. (Dipl.-Inform.) in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe in 1992 and his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany in 1998. Until 2004 he was a research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.