Adapted from a talk by...

Carole GobleUniversity of Manchester, UK

FaceBook for Workflow e-Scientists

myexperiment.org

myExperiment.org• A community social

network• A market place• A gateway to other

publishing environments

• A platform for launching workflows

• Encapsulated myExperiment Objects

• Mindful publication

Who is it by and for?Young people.• With “MTV” thinking.• Familiar with games.• And shopping.• And social networks.

• Make our tools like these.• Say NO to 1970s interfaces• Say NO to restrictive tooling

Social Space & Shop: Semantic Challenge• Shopping for Workflows, Services Components.

Aggregating workflows and provenance. Fuel for diagnostics. Find a similar workflow.

• Organised metadata• Identity and Ontology Authority

Open tagging, folksonomies, blogging, profiles, recommendations, social network analysis e-tracking

Warehouse or Federation

• Community web site?• Distributed stores?• Mixed identity regimes– Identity authority

• Multiple myExperiments– Publish what I want

when I want.

• Open Archives Initiative

Portals, wikis and community repositories

Science is not Pop MusicScientists are not Schoolgirls

• OpenWetWare is open• Some Rights Reserved. Protection as well as sharing.• Curation and Policing. Quality, Reliability, Validation, Safety,

Persistence, Longevity, Palpability?• Pollution and viral infections.• Privacy, IP, Authorship attribution and guarantees.• Provenance can help.• In-house results mixed with community resources.• Maximum ease of sharing to achieve collective benefits – so

workflows are "hackable" and "remixable". – When does your workflow stop being your workflow?

• “Hell is other people’s workflows” (as Jean Paul Sartre might have said)

– Small labs or individuals– Specialist workflows– Expert and inexpert

Leveraging and Serving The Long Tail of Users

– Big labs & big groups– Common de facto

workflows

Users Add Value• Adoption depends on lots of shared services and

lots of shared workflows• Incentive models for Scientists to share?– Fame, reputation and funding. – Not being second; not being misrepresented.– Add value to my service / application– Get my tool / codes / dataset used– Collaborate to compete. Good citizenship.– Authorship recognition and credit.– Protect my turf

• The Selfish Scientist – e-Science is me-Science

From me-Science to we-Science

• Tribal bonding and sharing• Crossing Tribal Boundaries• Across communities and

disciplines (MIT)• “Intellectual Fusion” &

“Swarming”• Understanding outside my

expertise.– E.g. sources of error

• Serious metadata issues.• Serious social issues.

©

Technical Challenges• Workflow warehouse / federation of repositories Open Archives

Initiative. Federated myExperiments. Sharepoint.• Social space + organised rich site Social discourse + organised service /

workflow space using curated semantics.• Granularity and identifiers Rolling-up provenance. Id resolution• Open vs protected content Quality, Reliability, Validation, Safety,

Intellectual Property, Ownership, Secrecy, A duty of guardianship. Curation? Policing? Local data mixed with shared resources

• Desktop integration Google gadgets for workflows. Interacting with workflows through Office products.

• Workflow execution (WHIP) Workflows Hosted in Portals project

• Socialisation of communities• Enabling Scientists added value through applications and collaborative

tagging

Conclusions

• Please join in at• http://www.myexperiment.org