MoSeS:
Finding a route to a Promised
Land
Andy Turner
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/
The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on e-Research Infrastructure,
Applications and Users 2009-03-23 to 2009-03-27
Presentation Outline
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Introduction
History of my web content
Web 2.0 impacts on e-Research
MoSeS Sustainability
GENESIS
Developing an e-Infrastructure for Social
Simulation (e-ISS)
• Recap and the killer app
Introduction
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This session
MoSeS
Micro-blogging and feedback
Twitter and open micro-blogging
This session
• 50 minutes
– Go through things at least three times
• First time to introduce
• Last time a brief recap
• Open session
– I encourage your interactive and feedback
– Feedback with (micro)bloggers in the room
• To demonstrate some benefits of it.
MoSeS
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MoSeS is about Modelling and Simulation (for of in) e-Social Science
– More introduction and an attempt to define e-Social Science to follow
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This presentation is more about the process of developing MoSeS and
the use of blogs and wikis to capture that and bootstrap its
development
– I am not planning to go into detail about the demographic modelling or its
applied uses unless you really want me to
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All the MoSeS code we developed is open source and Java and that is
the core of our work
We did use great tools developed by others to do this most of this is
open source and Java
– Netbeans
– MPJ Express
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We did use a variety of computational resources
– We got more results thanks to NGS
Micro-blogging and feedback
• Hands up who in the room might micro-blog
about research3 during this session
• I’m using identi.ca @andyt
– This is forwarded to Twitter @agdturner
– Have a quick look
• Anyone using any other service, please shout
out what it is
– If anyone does shout this out, someone please
blog it on one of the above channels
Twitter and open micro-blogging
• A Twitter user for a bit over 2 days
• Thanks to Twitter and its users and profile
– I now appreciate the benefits of micro-blogging
• But
–But
»But
Twitter not open enough for my liking
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There is an open alternative to Twitter called identi.ca
– A service based on Laconica
• Based on open standards
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Some of you have experience with this and have used Twitter for
practical reasons
– I urge you to switch back
– Break out before it’s too late
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My friend Ciaran Gulnieks
– A micro-blogging expert
• Among other things
• Convinced me that Laconica is a good way to go
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http://tinyurl.com/cc2yrg#ciarang
I’ve been thinking about how to get this into iGoogle tomorrow and how
I can then get the Google Gadget into the NCeSS Sakai Portal
History of my web content
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In the beginning
The dark ages and the enlightenment
Blog and wiki
Blog blog blog
Publishing fun and metadata
Using a VRE
In the beginning
• Web content evolves over time
– I began with static web content
– Served out by the CCG web server
• I started to contribute project pages to this in 1997
• Soon after, the School of Geography got its own Web Server
– I got a basic web home page on this
– I began to develop it
• Most of what I did was publish static HTML
• Many projects were benefitting from using content management
systems
– For the lifetime of the project this was good, but for how long would
the content survive?
The dark ages and the enlightenment
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Catastrophic end for the CCG Web Server
– We had been crossing our fingers for too long
• No resource to do anything about it
– A major problem for CCG
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Most of the people involved on the projects hosted on that had moved on
Andy Evans and I began to sort out the mess which had been
accumulating since about 1994.
– Our first focus was our own projects
– Next were the high profile projects we were getting harassed about
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We began the task of restoring the history of our research group
– It has taken years to get back to where we are now
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Has anyone else here experienced something like that?
– Did you lose a lot?
• What did you lose most of dynamic or statically served content?
– RIP
• Most of the CCG dynamically generated content was gone and
we’re unlikely to ever get it back
– Some applets survived
– Pages served out via Content Managements Systems (CMS)
• Backed with old databases
• Fossilised
• Most CCG projects had set up and used a different CMS
– State of the art for the time
• It seemed best to start again
– Extreme
• Second time round I was in charge of the web content
– Determined to try to keep track of what we were doing and clean up
and re-input the history as we went along.
Blog and wiki
• I began using wikis and blogs to collaborate in about 2005
– The initial use was for reading content
– Soon I was editing wiki content and commenting on blogs as anon
• It took me a while to realise that I really should get an account or
to blog myself if I was ever going to keep track of my blog
comments
• Similarly I felt the need to start compiling a dossier of what wiki’s
I used and what wiki changes I made
– The tools were not really helping by recording my use and making
my contribution clear
• I foresaw a difficulty if I was ask for my publications and I was unable to
point to any evidence that I had contributed to the development of a
resource.
• I wanted to make a dossier, make it open, make it a blog of sorts
Blog blog blog
• Start of 2006, 6 months after MoSeS began I started my own blog,
blogging most working days
– It was static HTML and I didn’t use any Web 2.0 tool it was all done via
my area on the School of Geography web site
– http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/
• After a couple of months I produced an RSS feed and added a new
item once a month.
• In the first couple of months I was mainly posting about what I was
reading
• Soon I was blogging about much of the work I was doing
• Soon I felt compelled to blog every day
• Each monthly item and each daily entry took the form of nested lists
• Gradually over time a daily template evolved
• With practice
– I got better at my style of blogging and it became less of a burden
– I began blogging as I was doing things
• My system/workflow involved uploaded files from a PC in my
office in Leeds to the web server
– I wanted to start blogging in meeting away from my office
• Time to consider my options
• At the start blogging was fairly time consuming thing and the
rewards seemed quite distant, but I got enough reward to keep
going and I got some good encouragement from others.
– I might have stopped without it
– My key user kept me going
• Thank you Paul Townend
Publishing fun and metadata
• I have became increasingly aware of standards and
the importance of using them to make things
interoperable and improve accessibility and
openness
• In 2005 I started to update all my web pages so that
they were conforming to the standards that had
evolved
• Blogging helped to drive this process, but I also had a
lot of old projects and pages which I might not update
often
– So I systematically went though them all
• Revisiting old projects and applications was interesting and
good revision
– It sort of kept the projects alive
• None of the information content on the pages was perfect either
so I began an on-going campaign of incremental improvement
• I got a lot of instant satisfaction in improving these things and a
feel good factor about making things available
– When I got positive feedback from others or could use this work it
was a great feeling
• Some of my personal pages started to change quite a lot and I
thought each page needed some basic metadata, a version and
a date when it was published
– There is a history in the comments a track of this metadata in my
Web Pages
• I can see when and how often I was updating things.
– Occasionally I would keep a version of the page in a separate file.
– As well as being useful for me to keep track, this was also
potentially useful for anyone wanting to reference my web content
Using a VRE
• Promotion of Sakai made me give it a go
• It was also open source and developed in Java and was looking
to be standards compliant
– It ticked these important boxes
• In the last year or so, since the NCeSS Sakai Portal has been
available, more and more of my blogging is being done via the
wiki tool and on my personal worksite.
– http://portal.ncess.ac.uk/portal/site/%7Ea.g.d.turner%40leeds.ac.uk
– You’re not supposed to access that, but you can the wiki
• http://tinyurl.com/c57ws2
• Which links to various resources which are mainly files
• For MoSeS I wanted to capture information about meetings took
place, and I started distilling Time for a progress report on
MoSeS
• What links to the CCG and School of
Geography Web Content I’ve developed?
– Who read it?
• Not much chance of identifying other users now
– Unless someone has been working in similar way to me
– It is increasingly easy to find those links that have
persisted over time and maybe one day I’ll get
around to it.
MoSeS Sustainability
• MoSeS has matured, but how mature is it?
• 8 months ago preparing for the Oxford
eResearch Conference
– First phase NCeSS/ESRC funding still paying it’s
way
– Increasing documentation burdon
– Finally getting somewhere producing results and
developing collaborations
GENESIS
• Generative e-Social Science
• Deciding what to do with this
• I aim to capturing the process from the start on the
NCeSS Sakai Portal
– Trying to encourage the team to adopt this way of working
– Leaving a trail to help those trying to understand how
research is done
• Using a shared WordPress blog to foster
collaboration and for dissemination and getting
feedback on the research and research process
• Progress in Agent based modelling of Daily Activity
Developing an e-Infrastructure for Social
Simulation (e-ISS)
• JISC are the saviours of us all
• We are about to start
• We captured some of the process of
developing the proposal
• We can sustain the NCeSS Sakai Portal
• Long live NCeSS!
Back to origins again
• SIM-UK
• The next big thing
• Killer app
– Road Safety
– Analysing road accident risk
Recap and the killer app
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Introduction
History of my web content
Web 2.0 impacts on e-Research
MoSeS Sustainability
GENESIS
Developing an e-Infrastructure for Social
Simulation (e-ISS)
• Recap and the killer app
Thanks and Acknowledgements
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CCG, University of Leeds
SIM-UK
NCeSS
NGS
EGEE
EC/ESRC/JISC
e-Research community
Organisers
You
Introduction
• Andy Turner
– http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner
– Autobiography
– Blog
• http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/personal/blog/
• MoSeS
– http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/MoSeS/
• Open e-Research
– Research and blog about it in detail
– Distill from the blog
What is MoSeS?
• Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science
– http://www.ncess.ac.uk/research/nodes/MoSeS/
– e-Social Science being the application of e-Science
concepts to social science problem domains
• e-Science is enhanced science that uses the Internet, software
tools and structured information for collaborative work
• A first phase research node of NCeSS
– Part of a UK collaborative partnership developing e-Social
Science
– The key part of it’s program of work is to develop an
individually based demographic model of the UK for 2001 to
2031
• MoSeS people
MoSeS Starts for the Promised Land
• Work on MoSeS was divided into 3 strands
– demographic modelling
– applications of demographic models
– user interface and portal development
• 3 applications
– health care planning
– transportation research
– business application.
My MoSeS Checklist
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Outputs to be made as openly available as possible
Use appropriate standards
Automate with free and open source software.
Results to be replicable
Be open about what we were trying to do and how
Adopt best practice and learn from others in NCeSS
and think about what else they wanted.
Blogging
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What is a blog?
Why blog?
The evolution of my blog
People use my blog
It has opened up what I do
The benefits far outweigh the costs
Philosophy of e-Social Science
• Jankowski 2007, Scott and Venters
2007
• Is e-Social Science open by definition?
• Is e-Social Science more than simply
the application of e-Science methods to
the social sciences?
Reflection on MoSeS
• Never-ending story…
• Too early to judge?
• There are many positives:
– I have learned a great deal over the last 3 going
on 4 years and found a community of
collaborators that I am happy and excited to work
with.
– I have developed a lot of structured information
about me and my research interests.
– I have participated in lots of surveys.
Acknowledgements and Thanks
• This work was supported by the ESRC under
RES-149-25-0034.
• Thanks to all involved in eResearch for your
ongoing collaboration.
• Special thanks to my NCeSS and MoSeS
colleagues.
• Thanks to the Oxford eResearch conference
organisers.
• Thank you for listening!
MoSeS Rationale
• The idea is to provide planners, policy makers and
the public with a tool to help them analyse the
potential impacts and the likely effect of planning and
policy changes.
• Example Application:
– There may be a housing policy to do with joint ownership,
taxation and planning restriction legislation that can be
developed to alleviate problems to do with lack of affordable
housing and workers without precipitating a crash in the
housing market and economy as a whole
– A balanced policy may be easier to develop by running a
large number of simulations within a system like SimCity for
real to understand the sensitivities involved
Initial Tasks
• Develop methods to generate individual
human population data for the UK from 2001
UK human population census data
• Develop a Toy Model
– Dynamic agent based microsimulation modelling
toolkit and apply it to simulate change in the UK
• Develop applications for
– Health
– Business
– Transport
Challenges
• Grid enabling the data and tools
• Visualisation
– Google Earth
– Computer Games
• Collaboration
• Retaining a problem focus
• Design and Development
Generic MoSeS Approach
• MoSeS to date has approached Modelling and
Simulation from a specific angle
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Geographic
Demographic
Contemporary
About the UK
Targeted towards supporting a developing set of applications
• It is not a requirement to make it clear what steps can
be followed by other Social Scientists wanting to
Model and Simulate something different
– However, the generic work of MoSeS should be relevant and
we are working towards this
MoSeS Vision
• Suppose that
computational
power and data
storage were not an
issue what would
you build?
– SimCity
• http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/SimCity
• For real on a
national scale
MoSeS First Steps
• The development of a national demographic model
• The development of 3 applications
– Health care
– Transport
– Business
• The development of a portal interface to support the
development and resulting applications by providing
access to the data, models and simulations and
presenting information to users (application
developers) in a secure way
Households
Communal Establishments
Aggregate HPControl Characteristics
HSAR
ISAR
Aggregate CEP
Control
Characteristics