Enabling quantitative data analysis through e-infrastructures

This paper discusses how quantitative data analysis in the social sciences can engage with and exploit an e-Infrastructure. We highlight how a number of activities which are central to quantitative data analysis, referred to as ‘data management’, can benefit from e-infrastructure support. We conclude by discussing how these issues are relevant to the DAMES (Data Management through e-Social Science) research Node, an ongoing project that aims to develop e-Infrastructural resources for quantitative data analysis in the social sciences

Integrating Spatial Data Linkage and Analysis Services in a Geoportal for China Urban Research

Many geoportals are now evolving into online analytical environments, where large amounts of data and various analysis methods are integrated. These spatiotemporal data are often distributed in different databases and exist in heterogeneous forms, even when they refer to the same geospatial entities. Besides, existing open standards lack sufficient expression of the attribute semantics. Client applications or other services thus have to deal with unrelated preprocessing tasks, such as data transformation and attribute annotation, leading to potential inconsistencies. Furthermore, to build informative interfaces that guide users to quickly understand the analysis methods, an analysis service needs to explicitly model the method parameters, which are often interrelated and have rich auxiliary information. This work presents the design of the spatial data linkage and analysis services in a geoportal for China urban research. The spatial data linkage service aggregates multisource heterogeneous data into linked layers with flexible attribute mapping, providing client applications and services with a unified access as if querying a big table. The spatial analysis service incorporates parameter hierarchy and grouping by extending the standard WPS service, and data‐dependent validation in computation components. This platform can help researchers efficiently explore and analyze spatiotemporal data online.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110740/1/tgis12084.pd

Towards an interoperable healthcare information infrastructure - working from the bottom up

Historically, the healthcare system has not made effective use of information technology. On the face of things, it would seem to provide a natural and richly varied domain in which to target benefit from IT solutions. But history shows that it is one of the most difficult domains in which to bring them to fruition. This paper provides an overview of the changing context and information requirements of healthcare that help to explain these characteristics.First and foremost, the disciplines and professions that healthcare encompasses have immense complexity and diversity to deal with, in structuring knowledge about what medicine and healthcare are, how they function, and what differentiates good practice and good performance. The need to maintain macro-economic stability of the health service, faced with this and many other uncertainties, means that management bottom lines predominate over choices and decisions that have to be made within everyday individual patient services. Individual practice and care, the bedrock of healthcare, is, for this and other reasons, more and more subject to professional and managerial control and regulation.One characteristic of organisations shown to be good at making effective use of IT is their capacity to devolve decisions within the organisation to where they can be best made, for the purpose of meeting their customers' needs. IT should, in this context, contribute as an enabler and not as an enforcer of good information services. The information infrastructure must work effectively, both top down and bottom up, to accommodate these countervailing pressures. This issue is explored in the context of infrastructure to support electronic health records.Because of the diverse and changing requirements of the huge healthcare sector, and the need to sustain health records over many decades, standardised systems must concentrate on doing the easier things well and as simply as possible, while accommodating immense diversity of requirements and practice. The manner in which the healthcare information infrastructure can be formulated and implemented to meet useful practical goals is explored, in the context of two case studies of research in CHIME at UCL and their user communities.Healthcare has severe problems both as a provider of information and as a purchaser of information systems. This has an impact on both its customer and its supplier relationships. Healthcare needs to become a better purchaser, more aware and realistic about what technology can and cannot do and where research is needed. Industry needs a greater awareness of the complexity of the healthcare domain, and the subtle ways in which information is part of the basic contract between healthcare professionals and patients, and the trust and understanding that must exist between them. It is an ideal domain for deeper collaboration between academic institutions and industry

Engage - Using Data About Research Clusters to Enhance Collaboration

This project explored different classifications of research and ideas for implementing these in University systems to facilitate publicity of research