Towards a cyberinfrastructure for enhanced scientific

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises to enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. A recent (February 2003) report to the U.S. NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The articulation of this programmatic vision reflects a widely shared expectation that solving the technical engineering problems associated with the advanced hardware and software systems of the cyberinfrastructure will yield revolutionary payoffs by empowering individual researchers and increasing the scale, scope and flexibility of collective research enterprises. The argument of this paper, however, is that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve such an outcome; success in realizing the cyberinfrastructure’s potential, if it is achieved, will more likely to be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration – that is to say, its supposedly “softer” parts -- are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing “e-Science” will be seen to lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in interorganizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration is held to be the more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. The paper concludes by proposing several “solution modalities,” including some that also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcends organizational boundaries.

Towards a cyberinfrastructure for enhanced scientific

Scientific and technological collaboration is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. A February 2003 report to the U.S. NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The argument of this paper is that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve such an outcome; success in realizing the cyberinfrastructure’s potential, if it is achieved, will more likely to be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration that is to say, its supposedly “softer” parts -- are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing “e- Science” will be seen to lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in interorganizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration is held to be the more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. The paper concludes by proposing several “solution modalities,” including some that also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcends organizational boundaries.

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

TOWARDS INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES FOR E-SCIENCE: The Scope of the Challenge

The three-fold purpose of this Report to the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Research Councils (UK) is to: • articulate the nature and significance of the non-technological issues that will bear on the practical effectiveness of the hardware and software infrastructures that are being created to enable collaborations in e- Science; • characterise succinctly the fundamental sources of the organisational and institutional challenges that need to be addressed in regard to defining terms, rights and responsibilities of the collaborating parties, and to illustrate these by reference to the limited experience gained to date in regard to intellectual property, liability, privacy, and security and competition policy issues affecting scientific research organisations; and • propose approaches for arriving at institutional mechanisms whose establishment would generate workable, specific arrangements facilitating collaboration in e-Science; and, that also might serve to meet similar needs in other spheres such as e- Learning, e-Government, e-Commerce, e-Healthcare. In carrying out these tasks, the report examines developments in enhanced computer-mediated telecommunication networks and digital information technologies, and recent advances in technologies of collaboration. It considers the economic and legal aspects of scientific collaboration, with attention to interactions between formal contracting and 'private ordering' arrangements that rest upon research community norms. It offers definitions of e-Science, virtual laboratories, collaboratories, and develops a taxonomy of collaborative e-Science activities which is implemented to classify British e-Science pilot projects and contrast these with US collaboratory projects funded during the 1990s. The approach to facilitating inter-organizational participation in collaborative projects rests upon the development of a modular structure of contractual clauses that permit flexibility and experience-based learning.

Designing Institutional Infrastructure for E-Science

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more dependent upon access to, and sharing of digital research data. Thus, the U.S. NSF Directorate committed in 2005 to a major research funding initiative, “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery”. These investments are aimed at enhancement of computer and network technologies, and the training of researchers. Animated by much the same view, the UK e-Science Core Programme has preceded the NSF effort in funding development of an array of open standard middleware platforms, intended to support Grid enabled science and engineering research. This proceeds from the sceptical view that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve the outcomes envisaged. Success in realizing the potential of e-Science—through the collaborative activities supported by the "cyberinfrastructure," if it is to be achieved, will be the result of a nexus of interrelated social, legal, and technical transformations.e-science, cyberinfrastructure, information sharing, research

Cross-middleware Interoperability in Distributed Concurrent Engineering

Secure, distributed collaboration between different organizations is a key challenge in Grid computing today. The GDCD project has produced a Grid-based demonstrator Virtual Collaborative Facility (VCF) for the European Space Agency. The purpose of this work is to show the potential of Grid technology to support fully distributed concurrent design, while addressing practical considerations including network security, interoperability, and integration of legacy applications. The VCF allows domain engineers to use the concurrent design methodology in a distributed fashion to perform studies for future space missions. To demonstrate the interoperability and integration capabilities of Grid computing in concurrent design, we developed prototype VCF components based on ESA’s current Excel-based Concurrent Design Facility (a non-distributed environment), using a STEP-compliant database that stores design parameters. The database was exposed as a secure GRIA 5.1 Grid service, whilst a .NET/WSE3.0-based library was developed to enable secure communication between the Excel client and STEP database