IEEE eScience: MyExperiment MyExperiment.org
myExperiment: Defining the Social Virtual Research Environment

David De Roure, University of Southampton

The point of this talk is to define what this thing is.
social process of science
- more to share
data, metadata, provenance, workflows, ontologies
these are the things that myexperiment is meant to help people share

workflow systems includes trident, taverna, kepler, triana, Ptolemy II
automate work to make reproducible and shareable
these workflows are difficult to build so it’s good to start with something – share
also they capture the context

it’s like sharing matlab scripts or models… not really sharing data, although you can do that, too.

example workflow for identifying biological pathways impliciated in resistance to x in cattle
jo working on whipworm in mouse – meets paul, uses his workflow without being changed, and fins the biological pathways for sex dependence in mice.

is
community social network
fine control over sharing
federated repository
gateway to other publishing environments
platform for launching workflows
started 3/2007, open beta 11/2007 – 1331 users, 536 workflows

workflow – social metadata including
license
credits
attributions
tags
uploade

(q: how do scientists search for and find relevant workflows? - he says there's a paper on their wiki)

groups – sometimes more formal to control access to information

metrics are complicated – what do downloads or visitors mean?
but more content is good
more content – harder to find – but more people, so more social and use information to help you find it (can add in recommender systems)

other “social web sites for scientists” are really just linkedin but with different people – they’re trying to differentiate themselves.
credits & attributions (critical)
fine control over visibility and sharing
packs (make a collection)
federation
enactment (actually run workflows)

Packs –
obvious but really necessary – to make a shopping basket (ppt slide from a workflow or collection of workflows)
collect internal things or link to external things
share, tag, discover, and discuss

enactor is complicated – if workflow has to be in the same place as the data, or if it doesn’t then…

It’s open source, and it also has RESTful sources, Google gadgets
Taverna Plugin
export packs as OAI-ORE (they would like someone to consume this – they’ve produced it, but would like to see repositories using it)

there’s also SPARQL searching
using SIOC: semantically-interlinked online communities

software design for empowering scientists (their article – next issue IEEE software)
six principles of software design to empower scientists

1 fit in, don’t force change
2 jam today and more jam tomorrow
3 just in time and just enough
4 act local, think global
5 enable users to add value
6 design for network effects

the process
discovery > acquisition > prep/cleaning > transformation > interpretations > dissemination > curation
across all of these, provenance… and two other things that I didn’t type fast enough and have forgotten

can they make an e-laboratory? (it’s the office of the future :) ) – can there be an ecosystem of cooperating e-laboratories

what are the research objects?

new project BioCatalogue – a catalog of biosciences web services (http://www.biocatalogue.org/)

What is a virtual research environment?
facilitate mgmt and sharing of research objects (whatever they are)
support the social model?
open extensible environment
platform to action research – to deliver research objects to remote services and software.

future – sharing R, matlab, statistical models

question: is the community big enough for reputation?
answer: well primary reputation comes through publication – but as the site grows this is developing, favoriting , annotations.

Labels: IEEEeScience08

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