“Science Ajar”. “Chemistry Clouds and Crowds” Jeremy G. Frey 8 Dec 2008.

“Science Ajar”

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“Chemistry Clouds and Crowds”

Jeremy G. Frey 8 Dec 2008

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Smart Environments• The digital world offers significant possibilities to

enhance the quality and efficiency of scientific research, enabling the collaboration of the valuable human resources.

• To achieve this not only must the appropriate standards exist but the usable tools are essential.

• Smart People deserve Smart Environments

Science Ajar• Research materials need to be available

if they are to be used

– Data needs to be accessible, searchable and available in context,

– How open all data should be is a matter of considerable current debate.

– However even when we wish to make data available it is not easy to make the data available in context.

– Context/Environment needs to be transported along with the data.

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Very nice resume. Leave a sample of your DNA with my secretary

Small Scale long tail science• Typical Chemistry laboratory group with 1 – 20

researchers

• Publish concise and important papers which reference extensive local data sets and access international data sets

• The problems are with medium scale

• If once off then do it any reasonable way and record the data with sufficient annotations

• If very frequent then worth investing time for a complete infra-structure

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Motivations• Self interest first!

• Sharing comes as an additional benefit.

Always try to provide a caption next to your picture in this style

If only I knew exactly how she did this experiments

I know all this supplementary information could be useful but will people really remember the format? Is it worth all the hassle?

I wish I could get the numbers from this graph - the pdf is not much use.

I wish I had recorded things at the start the way I do now…..

Typical laboratory conversations

Some problems are due to the lack of information recorded at the time, others are due to loss of information over time.

Supervisors and Managers

I am sure we collected that inf ormation a f ew years ago…

The details should be in her lab book…..

Can you read what it says here….?

Can you fi nd the fi les of data that were used

to make the plot?

Better and more open communications• Need easy way to provide

access to the important local data (data not sufficiently important or long lived to be in the national collections)

• Avoid the need to scan a pdf graph

• Facilitate alternative and unexpected uses for the data

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Usability• No need to do everything

• Must be easy and simple to use

First let me pull up your file

Basically, we’re all trying to say the same thing

Excerpted from the Onion:

The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums.

Data Sharing

"We are merely exercising our right to defend our

intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer

notification of the existence of copyrighted material."

A daring daylight raid of copyright material

ACS

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 19 June 200810:32

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Journal publication

Test Data

RESULTS!Conference reports

Grant Applications

Analysis

Management

Time Line View

Sortase Experiment Map of the X-Ray Blog (comments not shown)

An RDF graph of posts and links between them rendered using Welkin (simile.mit.edu/welkin)

Data Source

ArchiveClient

WebClient

Mobilephone

Data Source

PDA

MessageBroker

TranslatorService BLOG

Smart Laboratory Spaces

May all our problems be technical• Try to avoid the ‘not made here

syndrome’

• Reduce time needed to look after data

• Make it easy to transport data in context

• Reduce the time spent of transforming data from one format to another

– (this is not just an issue of file formats but a much deeper issue of data analysis)

14“No, the computers are up. We’re down”

Personal ownership of the Data Life Cycle• We usually believe the

we are doing good, useful and important work, so it is only sensible to ensure that others can appreciate how good an useful it is!

• Publication@Source

• Curation@Source

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We forgot to invite any information providers

Another aspect of the Web 2.0 World?

Information Providers Information

Consumers

These are the same people – if we can ‘talk’ to

ourselves efficiently over time then that is a good

start to be able to ‘talk’ to others

Awareness of symbols and meanings in user interfaces

We need a Semiotic Web or at least a better

understanding of the semiotics of the web