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BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton Jon Blower, Adit Santokhee Reading e-Science Centre, University of Reading
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BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

Dec 16, 2015

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Page 1: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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

Page 2: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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

Page 3: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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.

Page 4: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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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

Page 5: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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

Page 6: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

LabTrove

Geodatabase

Godiva2 sites

RSS

GeoRSS

Page 7: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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)

Page 8: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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)

Page 9: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.
Page 11: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

Metadata captured automatically and used in filtering

Click on screenshot to load data in Godiva2

Page 12: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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

Page 13: BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University.

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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?