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| Titel |
BlogMyData: A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data |
| VerfasserIn |
Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey, Jon Blower, Adit Santokhee |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
| Datensatznummer |
250055564
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| Zusammenfassung |
| 1 Introduction
In the area of Earth system modeling collaborations take place chiefly through face-to-face
meetings, the scholarly literature and informal electronic exchanges of emails and documents.
All of these methods suffer from serious deficiencies that hamper effective collaboration. For
practical reasons, face-to-face meetings can be held only infrequently. The scholarly
literature does not yet adequately link scientific results to the source data and thought
processes that yielded them, and additionally suffers from a very slow turnaround
time. Informal exchanges of electronic information commonly lose vital context;
for example, scientists typically exchange static visualizations of data (as GIFs
or PostScript plots for example), but the recipient cannot easily access the data
behind the visualization, or customize the visualization in any way. Emails are
rarely published or preserved adequately for future use. The recent adoption of “off
the shelf” Wikis and basic blogs has addressed some of these issues, but does not
usually address specific scientific needs or enable the interactive visualization of
data.
2 The Solution
A Virtual Research Environment is an attractive solution to the above problems. In the
JISC-sponsored BlogMyData project we are creating such a VRE by combining the
capabilities of two existing technologies that have already seen wide adoption among
scientists:
The Godiva2 data visualization system (http://www.reading.ac.uk/godiva2)
provides a means for scientists to browse interactively in a “Google Maps-like”
fashion through large environmental datasets, including numerical model outputs
and high-resolution satellite imagery, using only a web browser. Scientists can
produce maps, timeseries and other plot types.
The LabTrove is a web-based blogging tool specifically designed for the
practising scientist to record, disseminate and evaluate their research. The
Blog can also be used as a collaboration tool that allows discussion between
colleagues. For open science work the blog uses standard protocols (such as
Really Simple Syndication, RSS) to publish its content to the public domain
but also contains the necessary access control to keep any private work secure.
Although initially designed for the use of laboratory chemists, the LabTrove is
being adapted in this project to meet the needs of environmental scientists.
Having logged in to the BlogMyData VRE using OpenID, users examine output from the
latest cutting-edge climate and ocean models using Godiva2. Upon finding a feature of
interest the user creates a new blog entry that is linked to the current visualization. The blog
entry is automatically tagged with metadata about the feature of interest (e.g. its location in
time and space, and the dataset from which it is derived). Colleagues provide input through
comments and by linking blog entries together. Through semantic and geospatial
tagging, scientists can discover colleagues working on similar scientific problems. The
system is augmented by the addition of a geospatially-enabled database, based on the
widely-used open-source PostgreSQL database with the PostGISextensions. This
database will associate blog entries with geographical areas and time periods and
allow users to discover discussions that relate to particular areas of interest very
efficiently.
The system is being developed with regular feedback from users in NCAS-Climate and
NCEO. We have created an end-to-end prototype of the system, in which users can create
blog entries based upon map-based visualizations. Blog entries are captured in a private blog,
which is only visible to a controlled set of users (authenticated using OpenID), thereby
maintaining the privacy of the research. Blog entries can be syndicated as GeoRSS feeds.
These feeds can be consumed in standard RSS viewers (such as Microsoft Outlook, Google
Reader and Firefox Live Bookmarks), or in “geo-enabled” viewers such as Google Maps. |
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