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

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Collaborative Development and Evaluation of Text-processing Workflows in a UIMA-supported Web-based Workbench

Challenges in creating comprehensive text-processing worklows include a lack of the interoperability of individual components coming from different providers and/or a requirement imposed on the end users to know programming techniques to compose such workflows. In this paper we demonstrate Argo, a web-based system that addresses these issues in several ways. It supports the widely adopted Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), which handles the problem of interoperability; it provides a web browser-based interface for developing workflows by drawing diagrams composed of a selection of available processing components; and it provides novel user-interactive analytics such as the annotation editor which constitutes a bridge between automatic processing and manual correction. These features extend the target audience of Argo to users with a limited or no technical background. Here, we focus specifically on the construction of advanced workflows, involving multiple branching and merging points, to facilitate various comparative evalutions. Together with the use of user-collaboration capabilities supported in Argo, we demonstrate several use cases including visual inspections, comparisions of multiple processing segments or complete solutions against a reference standard, inter-annotator agreement, and shared task mass evaluations. Ultimetely, Argo emerges as a one-stop workbench for defining, processing, editing and evaluating text processing tasks

Supporting text mining for e-Science: the challenges for Grid-enabled natural language processing

Over the last few years, language technology has moved rapidly from 'applied research' to 'engineering', and from small-scale to large-scale engineering. Applications such as advanced text mining systems are feasible, but very resource-intensive, while research seeking to address the underlying language processing questions faces very real practical and methodological limitations. The e-Science vision, and the creation of the e-Science Grid, promises the level of integrated large-scale technological support required to sustain this important and successful new technology area. In this paper, we discuss the foundations for the deployment of text mining and other language technology on the Grid - the protocols and tools required to build distributed large-scale language technology systems, meeting the needs of users, application builders and researchers