[CAnet - news] "me-science" the new e-science

[Good article in GridToday. I agree with the author, despite all the
ballyhoo of sharing, collaboration and news way of doing science, scientists
are human beings and not altruistic gods. As the old joke goes: "data mining
in the scientific community means the data is all mine". However the new SOA
and Web 2.0 tools can be used to enable indirect shared collaboration as
described in this article, and also through the shared use of instruments
and facilities. Excerpts from www.gridToday.com --BSA]

 
  'Me-Science' the New e-Science
  
  "It's not 'e-science,' it's 'me-science.'" This was the conclusion of 
  Carole Goble from the University of Manchester, having given one of 
  the most popular and well-attended keynote speeches of the EGEE'06 
  conference.
  
  Having worked closely with scientists, specifically in life sciences, 
  Goble said that our understanding of the true motivations of 
  scientists is essential for the development of Grid technologies. 
  "We're not building infrastructures for e- science, we're building 
  them for e-scientists," she explained.
  
  Goble presented the controversial viewpoint that while scientists are 
  motivated by advancing the frontiers of science, this is not 
  necessarily the principal motivation. Instead, she suggested, they are 
  motivated in large part by getting the best results first, in order to 
  gain, among other perks, more funding.
  
  This "selfish scientist" concept, a term coined by Robert Stevens from 
  the University of Manchester, suggests that scientists are not eager 
  to openly distribute their data around Grid communities, which 
  contrasts somewhat to the Grid idea of "sharing." 

  "We must therefore enable scientists to publish data at the right time 
  in their lifecycle," insisted Goble. To do this, she suggested paying 
  more attention to when people share data and who gets to see it, so 
  that scientists can preserve privacy and control over their work.
  
  Goble is currently developing a project entitled "myExperiment" to 
  attend to this problem. myExperiment is a collaborative research 
  environment that has been influenced by social networking programs 
  such as Wired and Flickr, and is based on the mySpace infrastructure. 
  myExperiment creates an environment for scientists to adopt Grid 
  technologies, where they can define when they share data, with whom 
  they share it and how much of it can be accessed.
  
  Goble also highlighted the potential of tagging the data, similar to 
  the process of social bookmarking currently used to catalog photos on 
  Flickr. 

  The myExperiment interface would be specific to each institution that 
  uses it and may mean that scientists won't notice the difference 
  between the Grid and the Web 

-----------
[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