The monthly newsletter from the National e-Science Centre
NeSC News
Issue 66 January/February 2009 www.nesc.ac.uk
Saving lives with the Semantic Web
By Iain Coleman
It all happened in the 14th century
BCE. The Hittite Empire, which
stretched from modern Turkey to
Syria, was at war with their eastern
neighbours, the Arzawans. Now the
Hittites had recently experienced
an outbreak of tularaemia, a nasty
bacterial infection that they had
figured out was being transmitted
by sheep. So, when the Arzawans
crossed into Hittite territory, they
kept finding abandoned rams by the
side of the road, which they gladly
took home to swell their own herds.
The resulting “Hittite Plague” lasted
around forty years, and eliminated
the Arzawan threat.
This isn’t just ancient history. The
bacterium responsible, Francisella
tularensis, poses serious bioterrorism
concerns today. Fortunately, there is
a great deal of data available on this
organism, which should make it easy
to study.
At least, you might think so. But
when Nadia Anwar (Glasgow)
tried to integrate the genomic and
proteomic data for this organism, it
turned out to be a lot harder than
she had expected. Information
discovery is not integrated: it exists
in silos defined by experimental
technologies, and data integration
across these technologies is far
from easy. Semantic data integration
should allow researchers to use
metadata to perform queries across
these disparate data sets, but in
practice it is still easier to write a
bespoke data warehouse to solve a
particular problem.
This was just one of the issues
raised at the workshop on “Semantic
Web Applications and Tools for
Life Sciences”, held at eSI on 28
November. The semantic web is an
attempt to systematically structure
the information on the web, such
that automated systems can analyse
and integrate it. It is potentially an
invaluable resource for life science
researchers, who
often need to bring
together large and
disparate data sets
from a wide range
of sources. This can
include data taken
from the grid, or
finding specimens
for validation
studies, as Michael
Krauthammer (Yale)
explained. Making
this process more
efficient can shorten
the time it takes to
bring treatments
from the laboratory bench to the
hospital bedside: it can literally be a
matter of life and death.
But, however important data
integration might be in the life
sciences, the fact remains that it is
too big, too sprawling a collection
of disciplines for anyone to solve
this problem all at once. Instead,
researchers across the globe are
working on pieces of the solution:
developing technologies that realise
some the benefits of the semantic
web, and studying particular usecases in order to develop systems
that work on a smaller scale.
Starting small and staying flexible
were the recommendations of Mark
Wilkinson (St Paul’s Hospital, UBC)
when he discussed how to get
knowledge out of scientists’ heads
and into computer systems. Experts
can create ontologies – formal
representations of concepts and
their relationships – which can be
interpreted by machines such that
non-expert users can effectively
access the experts’ understanding.
Wilkinson stressed the importance
of allowing data to be reclassified
for different purposes by different
people, and of not trying to define the
whole of biology all at once.
Photograph by MarcoTolo. Licensed under Creative Commons
Every ancient empire invented
something we take for granted today.
The Babylonians gave us astronomy
and mathematics. The Romans came
up with arches, domes and concrete.
And the Hittites invented biological
warfare.
F. tularensis colonies
The Health e-Child project,
which aims to create a gridbased healthcare platform for
European paediatrics, is one
attempt to systematise knowledge
in a particular area. The plan to
reuse well-established knowledge
is complicated by the fact that
different domain ontologies use
different notations, and these have
to somehow be brought into line.
Jimeno Yepes (Wellcome Trust)
outlined a proposal to create a
common terminological resource
for Health e-Child, essentially a
thesaurus that allows concepts in
one ontology to be mapped to similar
concepts that are labelled with
different names.
Another specific application of the
semantic web is BioGateway, a
project that looks as what genes
are involved in medically important
Saving lives with the Semantic Web - cont.
processes such as inflammation
or cancer. This system gives
researchers fast results to their
queries, in a human-readable form
– but, as Erick Antezana (Ghent)
explained, it is still far from answering
complex questions. Ultimately, with
more data sources and improved
reasoning capabilities, it will add
a new dimension of knowledge
integration to systems biology.
Of course it’s all very well integrating
information, but you also have
to be able to find it. GoWeb is a
semantic search engine for the
life sciences that combines web
searching, text mining, clustering and
ontology. Heiko Dietze (TU-Dresden)
presented benchmark statistics
for a variety of searches typically
performed by life scientists, and
showed that this system substantially
outperformed Google in picking out
the most relevant results. Retrieval
can also be improved by tailoring
knowledge representation systems
for web navigation, as Simon Jupp
(Manchester) explained. By using
SKOS, a relatively loose semantic
structure that is less strict than
the more commonly used OWL,
scientists can build a network of
relationships that lends itself to fast,
efficient retrieval.
So with all these possibilities, why
isn’t the semantic web being taken up
more widely by life scientists? Well,
the main issue is that there is not yet
a semantic web application that just
works, that is widely trusted, that has
an easy interface and that scientists
can just pick up and use immediately
to improve their research. Part of this
is the notorious e-Science incentives
problem, where professional rewards
come from creating complicated
things you can write papers about,
rather than simple things that work
for users. But even when researchers
do focus on users’ needs, the amount
of data they have to deal with keeps
increasing, so even though tools
have improved a lot in recent years,
the problem has still become ever
more difficult.
Ultimately, if scientists begin to see a
real return on their investment of time
in using semantic web technologies,
a virtuous circle will develop and
the technologies will become more
widely used and will increase in
capability and scope. The practical
effectiveness of these pioneering
projects will determine whether, and
how quickly, the semantic web begins
to provide real benefits to people
suffering from illness, injury – or even
the Hittite Plague.
Slides and other material from this
event can be downloaded from http://
www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/922/
E-Science: The Changing Landscape
It’s time to take a fresh look at e-Science, and the issues and challenges we
face.
The National e-Science Centre will hold a two-day even on 16-17 April, 2009,
looking at the changes that have taken place in the e-Science world, and at
what the future is likely to be.
The first day is an invitation-only session for e-science directors, and will
look at the ‘embedding’ of e-Science and how to ensure its success; at the
new structure of e-Science now that some regional centres have closed, and
at how we can integrated local and national infrastructure. If you have not
received an invitation to this and feel that you should be included, please get
in touch with Dr Sarah Fulford on Sarah.Fulford@epsrc.ac.uk.
The second day of the event is open to all e-Science and HPC researcher,
plus university IT providers. The main focus of the day will be on ‘meeting the
researchers’, with the chance to hear success stories, reports on users from
eUptake and a half-day ‘village market’ of demos. The outputs from the first
day will also be discussed, along with the ability of specialist providers, such
as the e-Science centres, to link in with local university provision.
If you are interested in attending, or have any suggestions for the agenda or
demo session, please get in touch with Dr Fulford (details above).
Public version of e-IRG released
The first public version of the eInfrastructure Reflection Group (eIRG) White Paper 2008 has been
released and is now entering its
consultation phase.
“The purpose of the e-IRG
White Paper is to present key eInfrastructure areas and topics
requiring policy actions, and to
propose related recommendations
at the national and EU levels”, says
Fotis Karagiannis, editor of the
White Paper 2008. “In this way, the
e-IRG fosters the sustainability and
innovation of the European multilayer e-Infrastructure.”
The e-IRG White Paper is a key
document for the e-IRG mission,
which is “to pave the way towards
a general-purpose European eInfrastructure”.
Seven topics have been selected
and are examined in the document:
Grid and cloud computing, Security,
Education and training, Global
collaboration, Sustainability of the
computing-related e-Infrastructure,
Remote instrumentation, and
Virtualisation.
These hot topics were chosen after
several rounds of consultation
with experts belonging to the eInfrastructure community, and were
presented to the e-IRG delegates at
the e-IRG workshop in April 2008,
in Zurich. The present version of
the White Paper will remain open
to comments until the 6th of March
2009.
Please visit the e-IRG website
www.e-irg.eu to access the e-IRG
White Paper 2008, and to join in the
discussion.
Issue 66, January/February 2009
Renewing the Edinburgh e-Science MSc
In the December issue of the NeSC newsletter we announced that the Edinburgh e-Science MSc was being renamed
the MSc in Distributed Scientific Computing from 2009/10, to aid its discovery by potential applicants unfamiliar with
the meaning of the term “e-Science”. In this article we describe the second major outcome of our review of the MSc,
namely a set of three new mandatory courses which will better meet the requirements of our students (and their
future employers) given current trends in distributed computing technologies.
From its inception in 2004, the MSc has been intended to take students from a range of backgrounds and prepare
them for a range of career paths, as illustrated below:
Almost all the paths indicated in this
figure have been followed by students
from the first three MSc cohorts, and it is
our goal to keep the content of the MSc
updated so that it keeps all of them open.
To that end, our MSc review concluded
that we should expand our coverage of
distributed computing within the mandatory
core of the MSc, so that we can offer our
students experience with a wider range
of current technologies. From 2009/10,
the MSc will include three new mandatory
courses – Web Programming, Computing
with Distributed Resources and Internet
Computing – which we now outline, in turn.
Web Programming: This course is design to provide students with the basic understanding and skills needed to develop
web-based data analysis and presentation applications or domain portals. This requires not only an understanding of
the tool sets available to construct such applications but also a basic grounding in aspects of managing accessibility
for web-based applications, such as authentication and authorisation considerations, performance issues, reliability,
reproducibility and maintenance of state between sessions. The course will start from consideration of basic network
and web protocols (e.g. TCP/IP, HTTP, and FTP), and then cover ways of generating dynamic web content (e.g. with
CGI, PHP and AJAX), and conclude with mash-ups, geo-tagging and other simple ways of generating web applications
that are more than the sum of their parts.
Computing with Distributed Resources: This course is design to provide students with the basic understanding and
skills needed to develop applications in a distributed environment. It will provide an appreciation of the conceptual
difference in working in highly parallel and distributed systems compared to traditional serial application development.
The course will cover basic topics generic to all distributed systems – e.g. job submission, job monitoring and resource
allocation – as well as providing an understanding of different types of application (e.g. parameter sweeps, Monte
Carlo methods, etc) and of how to match domain problems to distributed solutions. During this course students will
gain hands-on practical experience of using the leading technologies for both compute-intensive (e.g. Condor, Sun
GridEngine, Hadoop) and data-intensive (OGSA-DAI) applications.
Internet Computing: This course is aimed at providing students with the skills and knowledge allowing them to carry out
a close analysis of a domain problem and develop services (data- or compute-focussed) which can be presented by a
number of methods (web portals, web services, etc). It differs from “Web Programming” in that it will focus more on the
techniques for understanding domain problems and de-composing them into models for automation, such as workflows
coupling web and grid services. This will lead into the basics of understanding “knowledge based” services using the
basics of ontologies, and semantic web technologies (ie. RDF, OWL etc).
Taken together these three courses provide a strong grounding in the techniques and technologies required for
accessing the potential inherent in the new world of connected resources. Students taking the MSc will be well placed
for a range of career paths exploiting this expertise, whether that be enabling a researcher or group to expand the
possibilities inherent in their domain or supporting a company in getting the best return from its presence in the online
world.Further information about the MSc in Distributed Scientific Computing can be found at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/
msc.
By David Fergusson, NeSC Deputy Director Training, Outreach and Education (dfmac@nesc.ac.uk) and Bob Mann,
MSc Programme Director (rgm@roe.ac.uk).
NeSC News
www.nesc.ac.uk
JANET Optical Event
Don’t miss this opportunity to attend the JANET Optical Event on
Wednesday 28th January 2009 at the ICO in London.
The aim of the event is to provide an overview of the work being carried
out under the JANET Optical Development Programme, and to provide a
glimpse into the future of optical networking technologies.
The event is aimed at network / technical managers within JANET
connected organisations who are responsible for the provision of network
services and are interested in understanding more about the possibilities in
store for JANET in the future.
Further details for this event, along with the programme and booking details,
can be found at:
http://www.ja.net/services/events/2009/optical_event/index.html
OWL Ontology tutorial invitation
DCC Charter
& Statement of
Principles
The DCC is delighted to announce
the release of its draft Charter and
Statement of Principles for public
comment. The DCC Charter and
Statement of Principles is intended
to:-Convey key curation messages
to primary stakeholders and to
our wider community -Inform and
influence political positioning in the
curation and preservation landscape
-Promote and publicise the DCC
and curation concepts -Facilitate
the process of consensus within the
DCC on critical issues of identity and
mission
This two-day introductory ‘hands-on’ workshop aims to provide attendees with
both the theoretical foundations and practical experience to begin building
OWL ontologies using the latest version of the Protégé-OWL tools (Protege4). It is based on Manchester’s well-known “Pizza tutorial” (see http://www.coode.org).
We are currently seeking your input
on the draft Charter and Statement
of Principles. To view the Charter and
Statement of Principles, please go to
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/charter/.
This tutorial, to be held at the University of Manchester on April 1-2, will
cover the main conceptual parts of OWL through the hands-on building of an
ontology of pizzas and their ingredients. A series of exercises take attendees
through the process of conceptualising the toppings on a pizza; the entry of
this classification into the Protégé environment; the description of many types
of pizza. All this is set in the context of using automatic reasoning to check the
consistency of the growing ontology and to use the reasoner to make queries
about pizzas. Since 2003 this tutorial, in various forms, has been given over
20 times and been attended by hundreds of budding ontologists.
DCC Public Survey
The aims of this tutorial are to: understand the use of ontologies; understand
statements written in OWL; understand the role of automatic reasoning in
ontology building; build an ontology and use a reasoner to draw inferences
based on it; gain experience in the Protégé 4 ontology building environment;
and gain insight into how OWL can play a role in semantic metadata.
Mr Simon Jupp is a Research Associate in the BioHealth Informatics group
in the School of Computer Science in the University of Manchester. His main
research areas include Semantic Web technologies and their application to
the life sciences. He is currently working on the Sealife project that is seeking
to develop a Semantic Grid browser.
To evaluate the level of current
curation activity and the DCC’s
effectiveness in raising awareness
regarding digital curation issues, we
would like to invite you to complete
our on-line survey. The survey will
take between 15 and 20 minutes to
complete and as a small token of
our appreciation, we are offering one
lucky entrant the chance to win an
iPod nano (competition rules apply).
Dr. Georgina Moulton is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the Northwest Institute
of BioHealth Informatics (NIBHI). She develops and presents training and
Continued Professional Development courses to national and international
researchers from a range of disciplines. Georgina has a background in
Bioinformatics and Biochemistry.
The results of this survey will help
us to evaluate our performance and
to refine our portfolio of products
and services and better meet your
curation needs.
Dr. Robert Stevens is a Senior Lecturer in the BioHealth Informatics group
in the School of Computer Science in the University of Manchester. His main
research areas are in the development and use of description logic ontologies
to facilitate the analysis of biological data. Robert has a background in
Bioinformatics, Computer Science and Biology.
To complete the on-line survey,
please go to http://www.dcc.ac.uk/
adding/public_survey/ .
To register and find out further information for advertised tutorials, please visit
the CO-ODE website at: http://www.co-ode.org/events/tutorials/
Scientists, researchers and scholars
across the UK generate increasingly
vast amounts of digital data. JISC
has funded the establishment of a
Digital Curation Centre (DCC) to
support curation activities within UK
institutions that create, store, manage
and/or preserve these data.
The deadline for completing this
survey is February 13th, 2009.
Issue 66, January/February 2009
National Grid Service Expansion
The NGS is pleased to announce three new affiliate members – the
universities of Durham, Reading and Royal Holloway, University of London.
Durham is a Tier 2 site within EGEE, which means that it is already playing an
important role in processing and analysing the data produced from the LHC, as
well as being a member of the UK GridPP project and a founder member of the
ScotGrid project. Therefore Durham has a great deal of experience of working
hand in hand with other organisations on a national and international scale
and we welcome the experience they will bring to the NGS. Using fair-share
algorithms to schedule and prioritise jobs,
Durham have enabled NGS access through their Particle Physics computing
resources. This means that the NGS will have access to a cluster which
provides over 700 job slots on new Quad Core Intel Xeon processors and over
30 terabytes of storage.
Phil Roffe, Systems Manager of IPPP at Durham said “With the cluster already
deployed in GridPP, the common infrastructure is in place to enable NGS access
and widen the use of the facilities to other researchers in the UK. Becoming an
NGS affiliate enables our resources and experience to be utilised further and at
the same time enhance the facilities available to NGS users.”
The University of Reading has been an affiliate member of the NGS since
March 2008 but chose to delay the announcement so it would coincide with
the upgrade to their Campus Grid. Reading has made its 500 PC Condor
pool available to NGS users across the UK and NGS resources have already
proved invaluable across the University, saving users precious time with jobs
that would take thousands of hours to run on a desktop machine.
Stephen Gough, Assistant Director of IT Services at the University of Reading
said: “IT Services is committed to engaging with the e-Infrastructure created
through the NGS. The Condor pool has already shown to be extremely useful as
a time saving aid for our researchers, while also giving them every opportunity
to collaborate effectively with colleagues across the UK.”
Royal Holloway, University of London has made its ‘Newton’ cluster available to
NGS users which has 200 processor cores (total 960 kSI2k) and 300 Terabytes
of disk storage. Although primarily used for LHC data analysis, any spare
capacity will be donated to NGS users.
NGS on the Road
Innovation Forum ‘08
The remaining presentation videos
The NGS is currently looking for
from the successful NGS IF’08
hosts for our roadshow events. The
are now available online thanks to
event lasts for approximately 3 hours
our colleagues at the Centre for eand gives an introduction to the
Science at Lancaster University who
NGS and what it can offer users and
videoed all the presentations at the
institutions as well as covering our
event. If you were unable to attend or
services such as training. The event
would like to relive your memories of
can be tailored for each institution
the event please visit http://e-science.
in length and content. Lunch is
lancs.ac.uk/NGS/
provided by the NGS and attendees
can leave the event with a grid
certificate enabling them to get up and running on the NGS even quicker.
If you are interested in holding a roadshow please contact the NGS Liaison
Officer (Gillian.sinclair@amnchester.ac.uk).
NeSC News
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 66, January/February 2009
e-Science
Institute
Time has come for computing e-Science
The recent Research Assessment
Exercise has shown that Computing
Science is now among the great
research subjects in the UK.
This country is often cited as the
source of some of the best medical
and biomedical research in the world.
Now computing science has joined
these disciplines as one of the UK’s
foremost intellectual outputs.
The recent review of research across
81 institutions found the subject not
only healthy and growing, but more
rigorous, more interdisciplinary, more
experimental and more user-oriented
than ever.
Computing scientists are working
with researchers from everincreasing areas of expertise – many
of which are in fields where such
collaborations are, to say the least,
unexpected. For example, they are
applying programming languages
to model cell biology, retrieving
documents from the internet based
on quantum theory, and building new
kinds of massively parallel computers
that mimic the human brain.
The subject area is growing, both in
size - nearly 50 per cent more staff
submitted to this RAE, compared
with 2001 - and in stature. The panel
which assessed Computing Science
and Informatics found that one
fifth of all publications were world
leading, with nearly two thirds rated
as internationally excellent. Research
funding more than doubled over
the 2001 to 2008 RAE period, from
£252M to £511M.
A key message was that
“computational thinking”, a way of
solving problems, designing systems
and understanding human behaviour,
drawing on concepts of computer
science, is having a wide impact
across all disciplines.
In the sector report released in early
January, the CS and Informatics
panel said “Computational thinking
is influencing all disciplines. This
influence is witnessed by the
inherently interdisciplinary nature
NeSC News
of this unit of assessment and its
strong cross-disciplinary links with
a wide variety of other disciplines.
In many respects computer science
is becoming a key enabling tool
for interdisciplinary research and
computer science methods are
influencing other disciplines. Much
of this increased interaction is due
to the RCUK e-Science Programme,
in which many members of the
community are fully engaged.
There was especially strong
interdisciplinary work with biology
(bioinformatics, system biology and
synthetic biology), medicine (ehealth), physics & astronomy and the
earth sciences (GIS).”
Professor Muffy Calder, chair of the
UK Computing Research Committee,
an expert panel of the British
Computer Society and the Institution
of Engineering and Technology, said
“Research in Computing Science and
Informatics has never been more
exciting. It covers a wide range of
challenges, from how to design and
build systems that are fit for purpose,
to the impact of computational
thinking on the physical and social
sciences, to the next generation
internet and new paradigms such as
quantum computing.”
The response from industry has
been extremely positive. Dr Andrew
Herbert, Director of Microsoft
Research (UK), said “ Having served
on the RAE Computer Science and
Informatics panel I am impressed
by the breadth, depth and vitality of
the discipline in the UK, reinforcing
the argument for basic our European
research laboratory in Cambridge,
England so that we can enjoy
fruitful collaborations with the UK
academic research community. In
our own work we are increasingly
making interdisciplinary connections
and creating tools to enable
“computational thinking” in other
disciplines including computational
systems biology and computational
ecology and environmental science.”
In Scotland, the SFC (Scottish
Funding Council) and ten universities
recently announced investment of
more than £29M to pool research
expertise and consolidate Scotland’s
position as international research
leader in Computer Science and
Informatics.
The creation of the Scottish
Informatics and Computer Science
Alliance (SICSA) will enable the
universities of Aberdeen, Abertay
Dundee, Dundee, Edinburgh,
Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Robert
Gordon, St Andrews, Stirling and
Strathclyde to enhance their research
capabilities, attract new academic
staff and promote a world-leading
international presence. Among its
key areas of research, SICSA will
securing, interfacing, modelling and
engineering the systems of tomorrow,
helping to create the next generation
of the internet, and developing new
ways for people to interact with
computers, beyond the traditional
keyboard-mouse-monitor interface.
Notes
1. UKCRC (UK Computing Research
Committee) is an expert panel
of the Institution of Engineering
and Technology and the British
Computer Society for computing
research in the UK. Its members are
leading computing researchers from
academia and industry.
2. Muffy Calder FRSE is Professor
of Formal Methods, Department of
Computing Science, University of
Glasgow.
3. Founded in 1991, Microsoft
Research is dedicated to conducting
both basic and applied research
in computer science. Its goals are
to enhance the user experience
on computing devices, reduce the
cost of writing and maintaining
software, and invent novel computing
technologies. Microsoft Research
collaborates with leading academic,
government and industry researchers
to enhance the teaching and learning
experience, inspire technological
innovation, and advance the state of
the art in computational science.
4. SICSA website http://www.sicsa.
ac.uk/images/SICSA-launch-pr.pdf
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 66, January/February 2009
e-Science
Institute
eSI Launches Two New Themes
By Iain Coleman
The e-Science Institute has
announced the two newest additions
to its programme of research themes.
Covering the next generation of
astronomical surveys and the impact
of Web 2.0 on research, these yearlong programmes of collaborative
research and workshops each aim to
engage leading researchers in their
respective fields, bringing visitors
to eSI to contribute to the themes’
activities and making substantial
advances in e-Science research.
Astronomers used to point their
telescopes at specific objects in the
sky for particular research purposes.
Now that style of astronomy is
being overtaken by systematic
sky surveys that gather data from
large regions of the sky to be sifted
and analysed by the community at
large. The current generation of sky
surveys has already given rise to a
Philosophical
Transactions A of
the Royal Society eScience online
Following on from the success
of the Royal Society discussion
meeting held on 7-8th April the
journal Philosophical Transactions
A of the Royal Society from this
session is now available on the
Royal Society website.
This is a special journal with
outputs from the NERC eScience
programme and also contains
contributions from other speakers
at the meeting. It is available
as open access and the papers
can be accessed here: http://
publishing.royalsociety.org/index.
cfm?page=1570
This will be available in print from
13 March 2009 and can be ordered
online. Copies will be distributed to
authors in due course.
NeSC News
number of e-Science projects, as
astronomers develop methods for
dealing efficiently with these multiterabyte data sets. Now, with the UK
planning its involvement in the next
generation of sky surveys, the time
is right for a thorough consideration
of the scientific priorities, data
management requirements, and
data analysis goals for astronomy
in the coming decade. This
theme, led by Bob Mann, Richard
McMahon and Bob Nichol, will aim
at producing a roadmap to guide
the UK astronomical community as
sky surveys going from producing
terabytes per year to terabytes per
night.
The second theme looks at how Web
2.0 technologies – blogs, wikis, social
networking and content tagging – are
influencing scientific research, and
to what extent e-Science can benefit
from a Web 2.0 approach. Entitled
“The Influence and Impact of Web
2.0 on e-Research Infrastructure,
Applications and Users”, the theme
is led by Mark Baker, David de
Roure and Carole Goble. Web 2.0
tools are already being used by
some scientists to deliver simple,
lightweight, user-driven applications
that can be created by relative
programming novices. This theme
will look at how these technologies
are currently used, at their potential
for more extensive exploitation by the
e-Science community, and at how
they can enhance the capabilities of
existing grid infrastructure. Usability,
security and interoperability will all
be studied, and there will be an
investigation into how Web 2.0 ideas
are changing the ways that science
is done.
Review of e-Science
This year UK e-Science will be the focus of a review which is being organised
by EPSRC on behalf of all Research Councils and in conjunction with the
learned societies. The aim of the review is to provide an independent
assessment of the quality and impact of the UK e-Science programme.
A panel of internationally leading researchers (from academia, industry, etc)
from outside the UK, will benchmark the strengths of UK research activities
compared to those found across the world, highlighting any gaps or missed
opportunities. The panel meeting will be held alongside the All Hands Meeting
in December 2009 which will allow them to meet many UK research groups,
and provide access to a wide pool of experts and supporting data to help
reach their conclusions. The review will report its findings in March 2010.
EPSRC are currently seeking nominations for a panel of experts. In order
to obtain an independent view, they are seeking individuals working outside
the UK, including UK nationals, who hold senior positions, currently active
in their field of research and be highly effective in team-working situations. Nomination forms can be found at: http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/epsrc/escirnom. Please note that the nomination process will close on 27 February
2009.
For further information please contact Dr Sarah Fulford, Infrastructure and
International Manager, sarah.fulford@epsrc.ac.uk, tel: +44 1793 44 4122.
IEEE eScience video archives
Archived video of the 2008 eScience presentations is now available on the
conference web site, at www.escience2008.iu.edu. Click on the Watch Video
link.
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 66, January/February 2009
NSF Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability Workshop
e-Science
Institute
Indiana University is hosting an NSF-sponsored workshop on “ Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability” on March
26 & 27th 2009. The workshop will focus on identifying strategies to create sustainable models for use, support,
maintenance, and long-term sustainability of cyberinfrastructure software that is developed and used by research
communities working in areas related to the NSF mission. The implications are expected to be interesting and useful
to the science and engineering community. Workshop goals include: examination of current software evaluation
and adoption models by labs and virtual organizations, and examination of long-term sustainability models; and
mechanisms for supporting sustainability via funding organizations, open source, and commercialization.
We are inviting the submission of position papers from the software and scientific community, to be used as input to
the workshop and as a way of identifying additional diverse participants. Submission of position papers is open to the
general community; position papers will be submitted via the workshop web page at http://cisoftwaresustainability.
iu-pti.org/ . This process is being modeled after the “TeraGrid future” position paper process (www.teragridfuture.org);
position papers will be limited to three pages total.
Undergraduate and graduate students are particularly encouraged to submit position papers. They should indicate
how participation in this conference would aid in their educational and career objectives. A limited number of travel
stipends will be awarded to student participants who are accepted. Letters of application may be submitted via the
workshop web page, http://cisoftwaresustainability.iu-pti.org/ .
For more information see - http://www.universityplace.iupui.edu/index.html and http://www.iupui.edu/.
Forthcoming Events Timetable
February
18
National Grid Service RA Training
NeSC
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/976/
23
1st Workshop on the Theory and Practice
of Provenance (TaPP ‘09)
Usenix
http://www.usenix.org/events/tapp09/
cfp/
23-24
NanoCMOS project meeting
NeSC
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/963/
24-25
Ensembl Advanced Workshop
NeSC
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/966/
4
Skills Courses for 1st Year Postgraduates
in the Mathematical Sciences
ICMS
http://www.icms.org.uk/workshop.
php?id=95
18
MIDAS - SINAPSE Meeting
eSI
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/954/
23-27
Influence & Impact of Web 2.0 on eResearch Infrastructure, Applications and
Users
NeSC
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/968/
March
This is only a selection of events that are happening in the next few months. For the full listing go to the following
websites:
Events at the e-Science Institute: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/esi.html
External events: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/ww_events.html
If you would like to hold an e-Science event at the e-Science Institute, please contact:
Conference Administrator,
National e-Science Centre, 15 South College Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AA
Tel: 0131 650 9833 Fax: 0131 650 9819
Email: events@nesc.ac.uk
This NeSC Newsletter was edited by Gillian Law.
Email: glaw@nesc.ac.uk
The deadline for the March 2009 issue is February 18, 2009
NeSC News
www.nesc.ac.uk