OGC/OGF usage in UK e-Social ScienceOGF 21, Seattle, USA Paul Townend

School of Computing, University of Leeds

Introduction

What is e-Social Science? National Centre for e-Social Science Use of geospatial data Why this is important for e-Social Science MoSeS Why standards? Use of OGC standards Use of Grid standards OGC/OGF standards from an e-Social Science perspective

What is e-Social Science

e-Science is large scale science carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet.

e-Social Science is the application of e-Science concepts to social science problem domains. This uses the Internet, software tools and structured information for collaborative work.

National Centre for e-Social Science

The UK National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) was founded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

It aims to investigate how Grid technology developed under the UK e-Science programme can benefit the social sciences.

The centre consists of a coordinating Hub (Uni of Manchester), seven Research Nodes, and twelve Small Grant projects.

Use of geospatial data

Examples in NCeSS?

Geospatial data in e-Social Science

Why it is important

Example node: MoSeS

MoSeS (Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science) is a research node of NCeSS.

MoSeS provides a suite of modeling and simulation tools grounded in a series of well-defined policy scenarios.

Aims of MoSeS (1)

MOSES has four high-level aims.

1) To create a flagship modelling and simulation node, in which the capabilities of Grid Computing are mobilised to develop tools whose power and flexibility surpasses existing and previous research outputs.

2) To demonstrate the applicability of grid-enabled modelling and simulation tools within a variety of substantive research and policy environments.

Aims of MoSeS (2)

MOSES has four high-level aims.

3) To provide a generic framework through which grid-enabled modelling and simulation might be exploited within any problem domain.

4) To encourage the creation of a community of social scientists and policy users with a shared interest in modelling and simulation for e-social science problems.

Aims of MoSeS (3)

There are an abundance of simulation games relating to people, cities and societies (past, present and future).

MoSeS poses the question of what would be the impact of transferring these simulations into a real world environment.

Supposing that computational power and data storage were not an issue, what would you build?

MOSES vision

MOSES architecture

Storage Resource Broker Cluster

SR

B authentication and authorisation

User

JSR-168 Compliant Portlet Container

Portlet container authentication and authorisation

MOSES Selection portlet

MOSES Analysis portlet

MOSES Charting portlet

MOSES Archiving portlet

MOSES Mapping portlet

MOSES archive store

MOSES forecasting store

MOSES map data store

BeowulfCluster

MOSES forecasting module

MOSES demographic module

CASWeb Data Resources

Internet

Screenshots

Screenshots

Screenshots

Why standards?

Preaching to the choir? I think a few paragraphs will do. Will add them soon.

Use of OGC standards

MoSeS: WPS? GeolinkingGeo-VUE:Other UK projects:

Use of Grid standards

MOSES is hard... SRB? Could talk about future WS-RF or similar for heavy computation

Other NCeSS projects?

OGC / OGF standards

From an e-social science perspective, why do OGC and OGF need to work together...

Examples of things that need to be done?