Enhancing Workflow with a Semantic Description of Scientific Intent

Peer reviewedPreprin

Joining up health and bioinformatics: e-science meets e-health

CLEF (Co-operative Clinical e-Science Framework) is an MRC sponsored project in the e-Science programme that aims to establish methodologies and a technical infrastructure forthe next generation of integrated clinical and bioscience research. It is developing methodsfor managing and using pseudonymised repositories of the long-term patient histories whichcan be linked to genetic, genomic information or used to support patient care. CLEF concentrateson removing key barriers to managing such repositories ? ethical issues, informationcapture, integration of disparate sources into coherent ?chronicles? of events, userorientedmechanisms for querying and displaying the information, and compiling the requiredknowledge resources. This paper describes the overall information flow and technicalapproach designed to meet these aims within a Grid framework

Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy

Progress in many domains increasingly benefits from our ability to view the systems through a computational lens, i.e., using computational abstractions of the domains; and our ability to acquire, share, integrate, and analyze disparate types of data. These advances would not be possible without the advanced data and computational cyberinfrastructure and tools for data capture, integration, analysis, modeling, and simulation. However, despite, and perhaps because of, advances in "big data" technologies for data acquisition, management and analytics, the other largely manual, and labor-intensive aspects of the decision making process, e.g., formulating questions, designing studies, organizing, curating, connecting, correlating and integrating crossdomain data, drawing inferences and interpreting results, have become the rate-limiting steps to progress. Advancing the capability and capacity for evidence-based improvements in science, engineering, and public policy requires support for (1) computational abstractions of the relevant domains coupled with computational methods and tools for their analysis, synthesis, simulation, visualization, sharing, and integration; (2) cognitive tools that leverage and extend the reach of human intellect, and partner with humans on all aspects of the activity; (3) nimble and trustworthy data cyber-infrastructures that connect, manage a variety of instruments, multiple interrelated data types and associated metadata, data representations, processes, protocols and workflows; and enforce applicable security and data access and use policies; and (4) organizational and social structures and processes for collaborative and coordinated activity across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.Comment: A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper, 9 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1604.0200

e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment : Challenges and Solutions

Peer reviewedPreprin

Open data and the academy: an evaluation of CKAN for research data management

This paper offers a full and critical evaluation of the open source CKAN software (http://ckan.org) for use as a Research Data Management (RDM) tool within a university environment. It presents a case study of CKAN's implementation and use at the University of Lincoln, UK, and highlights its strengths and current weaknesses as an institutional Research Data Management tool. The author draws on his prior experience of implementing a mixed media Digital Asset Management system (DAM), Institutional Repository (IR) and institutional Web Content Management System (CMS), to offer an outline proposal for how CKAN can be used effectively for data analysis, storage and publishing in academia. This will be of interest to researchers, data librarians, and developers, who are responsible for the implementation of institutional RDM infrastructure. This paper is presented as part of the dissemination activities of the Jisc-funded Orbital project (http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk