Software Design for Empowering Scientists

Scientific research is increasingly digital. Some activities, such as data analysis, search, and simulation, can be accelerated by letting scientists write workflows and scripts that automate routine activities. These capture pieces of the scientific method that scientists can share. The averna Workbench, a widely deployed scientific-workflow-management system, together with the myExperiment social Web site for sharing scientific experiments, follow six principles of designing software for adoption by scientists and six principles of user engagement

myExperiment: An ontology for e-Research

myExperiment describes itself as a "Social Virtual Research Environment" that provides the ability to share Research Objects (ROs) over a social infrastructure to facilitate actioning of research. The myExperiment Ontology is a logical representation of the data model used by this environment, allowing its data to be published in a standard RDF format, whilst providing a generic extensible framework that can be reused by similar projects. ROs are data structures designed to semantically enhance research publications by capturing and preserving the research method so that it can be reproduced in the future. This paper provides some motivation for an RO specification and briefly considers how existing domain-specifific ontologies might be integrated. It concludes by discussing the future direction of the myExperiment Ontology and how it will best support these ROs

The Use of Ontologies in Contextually Aware Environments

In this paper we outline work in progress related to the construction of contextually aware pervasive computing environments, through the use of semantic and knowledge technologies. Key to this activity is modelling both where and what a user is doing at any given time. We present a prototype application to illustrate this work and describe part of its implementation

SemWeB Semantic Web Browser – Improving Browsing Experience with Semantic and Personalized Information and Hyperlinks

Imagine a Web browser that can understand the context of a Web page and recommends related semantic hyperlinks in any Web domain. In addition, imagine this browser also understands your browsing needs and personalizes information for you. The aim of our research is to achieve this in open Web environment using Semantic Web technologies and adaptive hypermedia techniques. In this paper, we discuss a novel Semantic Web browser, SemWeB, which utilizes linked data for context-based hyperlink recommendation and uses a behavior-based and an ontology-driven user modeling architecture for personalization on Web documents. The aim of this research is to bring the gap between the technology and user needs using Semantic Web technologies in Web browsing

A Model-Driven Architecture Approach to the Efficient Identification of Services on Service-oriented Enterprise Architecture

Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture requires the efficient development of loosely-coupled and interoperable sets of services. Existing design approaches do not always take full advantage of the value and importance of the engineering invested in existing legacy systems. This paper proposes an approach to define the key services from such legacy systems effectively. The approach focuses on identifying these services based on a Model-Driven Architecture approach supported by guidelines over a wide range of possible service types

A Brief History of the Semantic Grid

The story of the Semantic Grid, from its originas in the UK eScience programme in 2001 through to the Dagstuhl event in 2005

Repositories and Linked Open Data: the view from myExperiment

While some repositories are focused on data, the myExperiment project has demonstrated the value in sharing the methods that are used to process that data - sharing know-how and building new capabilities through the community. Evolving usage of the website provides glimpses of the future behaviour of researchers and an exploration of what researchers might be sharing in the future instead of papers. This exploration of social sharing and ad hoc reuse has taken the project into the world of scholarly research objects, linked data and what might be described as "Linked Open Methods". We now see researchers beginning to share new methods that operate at this next level of research