blogmydata a virtual research environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data...
TRANSCRIPT
BlogMyDataA Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data
Andrew Milsted, Jeremy FreyDepartment of Chemistry, University of Southampton
Jon Blower, Adit SantokheeReading e-Science Centre, University of Reading
How do scientists collaborateday-to-day?
• Scholarly literature• Face-to-face meetings• Informal email discussions
• Artefacts very basic:– PDFs– Static images
• “Lowest common denominator” approach
• Context is lost• Preservation is ad-hoc
http://www. .org
• Combines web-based visualization…
• With a blog engine…• To create a VRE for
collaborative interpretation of data
www.rdg.ac.uk/godiva2
+ =blogs.chem.soton.ac.uk
@Keith: What do you think
is going on here?
@Tom: Looks like a bug in
the model.
@Harry: Could be a bad
observation. I’ll overlay
the obs database.
4
Godiva2• Interactively explore 4D
geospatial raster datasets on the web
• ~40 datasets– Research data,
operational forecasts, satellite products
• Images generated dynamically for maximum flexibility
• Hides technical complexity of the data from the users
http://www.reading.ac.uk/godiva2http://ncwms.sf.net
The blog (LabTrove)• Web-based blogging tool specifically
designed for the practising scientist– Originally designed for lab chemist
• Collaboration tool for enabling discussions– Blogs can be private or public
• Colleagues add comments and link blog posts together
• Version-controlled– Nothing can be deleted, but can be
updated
• Sophisticated metadata framework– We added geo-tagging
Illustrative use cases
• Postdoc/PhD student:– Discover an interesting feature in a dataset– Post a blog entry asking a question
• Colleague at a different institute– Discovers others working on same dataset and/or same
geographic area– Discovers blog entry, posts explanatory comment
• PI/Manager:– Views “hot topics” feed (most active discussions)
Feature summary• Create blog entries about different kinds of visualizations
– Chiefly map plots and animations so far
• Doesn’t store any data: just metadata and links
• Can highlight a point of interest– “What’s going on at this location?”
• Lots of metadata automatically captured– User dataset, variable, plot type– Geospatial and temporal context– Posts can be filtered on this metadata– Original visualization can be regenerated
• Proof of concept! (for now)
• Demo video: see http://blogs.blogmydata.org/projectblog/398/New_demonstration_video.html
User feedback guided development
• Privacy controls essential– We could give even more control in future
• “Content is king”– Prototype system needs to contain interesting
data!
• Animations difficult to handle but big attraction for users
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Future work• Prototype was developed quickly: needs
“hardening”• Increase the number of plot types
– Vertical profiles, timeseries• Improve playback of animations in browsers
– HTML5???• Improve use of filtering
– E.g. “Who else is working on density anomalies in the North Atlantic?”
– What are the hot topics of the last week?• KML and GeoRSS output for all types of
visualization– E.g. for Google Earth overlays
• Finer-grained security?