[CAnet - news] Cyber-environments for re-engineering the research process

[Another excellent article about the use of SOA - web services and workflow
for management of the research process.  For other examples of
cyber-environment tools please take a look at CANARIE's UCLP program at
www.uclp.ca or www.uclpv2.ca From Science Grid This Week 
http://www.interactions.org/sgtw/ -- BSA]
	
Re-engineering the research process

NCSA's Jim Myers
Jim Myers, Associate Director, NCSA Cyberenvironments and Technologies
Directorate

One could argue that scientists have been slowly losing the capabilities
that enabled the scientific revolution. Hundreds of years ago, the top minds
in any given culture had access to the overwhelming majority of their
culture's knowledge. There wasn't that much data to go around, and thinkers
tended to congregate at the intellectual epicenters. They all used a common
format -- text and drawings, even if it did mean you had to speak several
languages. And they all used a very limited set of tools. Mostly, they had
their brains, pencils, and benefactors.

That systemic view is something we've lost, locking up knowledge in a
variety of tools and databases and individual disciplines. Cyberenvironments
-- integrated, end-to-end software systems that will make
cyberinfrastructure as accessible and usable as Web browsers made the
Internet -- mitigate that loss. They'll give researchers the ability to make
connections across the whole of human knowledge and to have the global
perspective that enabled their forebearers' revolutionary advances.

Cyberenvironments support the re-engineering of science and engineering
research processes. Part of their role will be to provide an easy-to-use
interface to local and shared instruments, sensor arrays, data stores and
data sets, computational systems, networks, scientific and engineering
applications, data analysis and visualization tools, and services, all
within a secure framework. They go beyond simply providing access to
cyber-resources by enhancing researchers' abilities to manage complex
projects and automate processes within and across projects and disciplines
as well as collaborate effectively with colleagues near and far.
Cyberenvironments can also be tailored to allow researchers and educators to
interact with the cyberinfrastructure using concepts and approaches familiar
to their specific discipline.

Cyberenvironments are frequently thought of as being limited to gateways to
large-scale computational capabilities or community data stores or as
collaboration spaces. They are also often assumed to be Web portal-based and
disconnected from local tools. NCSA realizes that these definitions are not
sufficient to capture the full potential of cyberinfrastructure and satisfy
the future needs of scientists and engineers. In particular, future
cyberenvironments must:

    * Allow researchers to manage large-scale and complicated scientific
projects and processes.
    * Allow researchers to manage the diverse and large-scale experimental,
computational, and data resources needed to address challenging problems and
complex phenomena.
    * Bridge local, institutional, and national cyberinfrastructure to
create a seamless environment that assures the most efficient and effective
resources and capabilities are brought to bear on the problem at hand.
    * Assist in the bi-directional connection between raw or group research
artifacts (data, notes, plans, etc.) and published artifacts (vetted data,
annotations, best practices, reviews, and papers) to enhance the flow of
information between basic research and application and between research and
education.

In effect, they must enable the on-demand creation of new science and
engineering sub-disciplines that allow community knowledge and shared
resources to be quickly gathered around problems of interest.

To provide these capabilities, NCSA is developing high-level service
abstractions, above those currently available in the cyberinfrastructure,
and additional capabilities for automating or semi-automating processes. The
concept of visual knowledge discovery -- using data analysis to categorize,
cluster, and extract features from large data sets coupled with interactive
visualization -- is a prime example of new capabilities needed to allow
users to quickly digest data and build understanding. Similarly,
capabilities to manage semantic information about data and resources will
enable higher-level capabilities such as provenance tracking, annotation,
and collaborative data curation. There are a growing number of projects
developing the kinds of rich capabilities that cyberenvironments will
ultimately need. NCSA is at the forefront of applied research and
development in these areas.

NCSA is also enhancing the sustainability, adaptability, and scalability of
cyberenvironments. We're using current and emerging technologies such as web
and grid services, translating or integrating middleware (for example,
NCSA's MyProxy), global unique identifiers and metadata, workflow and
provenance, and semantic descriptions of resources and data. These
technologies reduce the burden of coupling cyberinfrastructure into
cyberenvironments, making it easier to integrate components from many
sources. Meanwhile, they maintain the environments' end-to-end nature.
Revamping current development methods and tools to support this approach
will be crucial to producing persistent cyberenvironments that support and
evolve with research over decades.

NCSA home page About NCSA | Projects | News | User Info | Staff Directory |
Intranet
Contact webmaster with questions regarding this page. Last updated May 3,
2006.
All rights reserved. C2006 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
	

-----------
[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


_______________________________________________
news mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news