Cameron Kiddle, Research Fellow with the Grid Research Centre, presented these slides as part of the Cybera Summit 2010 session "The Evolution of Collaborative Science." For more information please visit http://www.cybera.ca/evolution-collaborative-science

1. Collaborative Science:
Technologies & Examples
Cameron Kiddle
Research Fellow, Grid Research Centre (GRC)
University of Calgary

2. Outline
 Technologies
 Web 2.0/Social Networking
 Motivation
 Examples
 Academia.edu, Sciweavers, myExperiment,
HUBzero
 Examples GRC is working on
 GeoChronos, CyberSKA, WaterCloud
Cybera Summit 2
Sep. 22, 2010

3. 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)
Cybera Summit 3
Sep. 22, 2010

4. Social Networking
 Personal
 Business
 Academic
 White label
Cybera Summit 4
Sep. 22, 2010

5. 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
Cybera Summit 5
Sep. 22, 2010

6. 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
Cybera Summit 6
Sep. 22, 2010

7. Sciweavers (www.sciweavers.org)
 Bookmarking network
 Aimed at promoting
research work and
researcher visibility
 Share links to
presentations, notes,
source code,
datasets, etc.
Cybera Summit 7
Sep. 22, 2010

8. 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
Cybera Summit 8
Sep. 22, 2010

9. 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, …
Cybera Summit 9
Sep. 22, 2010

10. 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
Cybera Summit 10
Sep. 22, 2010

11. 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
Cybera Summit 11
Sep. 22, 2010

12. 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
Cybera Summit 12
Sep. 22, 2010

13. 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
Cybera Summit 13
Sep. 22, 2010

14. 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
Cybera Summit 14
Sep. 22, 2010

15. 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
Cybera Summit 15
Sep. 22, 2010

16. 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
Cybera Summit 16
Sep. 22, 2010

17. CyberSKA - Collaboration
 Social networking portal
 Elgg-based (elgg.org)
 Initially adapted from
GeoChronos with significant
development/customization
since
 Social networking services
 Blogs
 Tags
 Media/document sharing
 Wikis
 Friends/contacts
 Groups
 Discussions
 Message boards
 Calendars
 Status
 Activity Feeds
Cybera Summit 17
Sep. 22, 2010

18. 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
Cybera Summit 18
Sep. 22, 2010

19. 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
Cybera Summit 19
Sep. 22, 2010

20. 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 tool
Cybera Summit 20
Sep. 22, 2010

21. 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
Cybera Summit 21
Sep. 22, 2010

22. WaterCloud - 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
Cybera Summit 22
Sep. 22, 2010

23. WaterCloud – Visualization Tool
 Map for displaying
and selecting
monitoring stations to
analyse data for
 Manage monitoring
stations and
collections
 Select and plot data
Cybera Summit 23
Sep. 22, 2010

24. 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
Cybera Summit 24
Sep. 22, 2010

25. 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
Cybera Summit 25
Sep. 22, 2010

26. Contact Information
Cameron Kiddle
kiddlec@cpsc.ucalgary.ca
http://pages.cspc.ucalgary.ca/~kiddlec/
http://grid.ucalgary.ca/
http://geochronos.org/
info@geochronos.org
http://www.cyberska.org/
CyberSKA info@cyberska.org
Cybera Summit 26
Sep. 22, 2010