Social Networking and Scientific Gateways

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Social Networking and Scientific Gateways

• Roger Curry, Cameron Kiddle and Rob Simmonds
• Grid Research Centre
• University of Calgary

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Outline

• Motivation
• Related Work
• Integration Approaches
• Our Experiences
• Conclusions and Future Work

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Motivation

• Scientific Gateways
• Aim to enable collaboration and transparent
  access to data and computational resources
• Social Networking
• Can enhance collaboration capabilities and
  improve transparency
• Widely adopted
• Facebook
• gt 300 million users (50 log on to Facebook on
  any given day)
• gt 1 billion chat messages per day
• gt 2 billion photos, 14 million videos uploaded
  per month
• gt 350 thousand applications on Facebook Platform

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Related Work Social Networking for
Science/Academia

• Academia.edu
• Aims at being Facebook or LinkedIn for academia
• Biomedexperts (biomedexperts.com)
• Connecting biomedical experts based on author
  connections between publications
• SciWeavers (sciweavers.org)
• Bookmark and share links to source code, data
  sets, publications, presentations, etc.
• myExperiment (myexperiment.org)
• Share computational/data workflows and other
  research objects
• HUBzero (hubzero.org)
• Collaborative platform to share publications,
  presentations, etc. and provide on-line access to
  scientific tools
• REAL (Research Environments Associated with
  Learning through Social Networks)
• Access to data and compute resources from Second
  Life
• OGCE (Open Grid Computing Environments)
  (collab-ogce.org)
• Recently began development of OpenSocial based
  gadgets/containers

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Integration Approaches

• Build on an Existing Social Network
• Build a Custom Social Network Hosted by a Third
  Party
• Build a Custom Social Network Hosted In-House

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Build on an Existing Social Network

• Examples Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, orkut
• Advantages
• Likely that users are already members
• Familiarity with features/tools
• Wide range of robust features/functionality
• Do not have to scale/maintain collaborative
  aspects
• Disadvantages
• Lack of control/customization
• Data privacy/ownership
• Distractions advertising, social noise
• Risks affiliated with vendors going out of
  business

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Build a Custom Social Network Hosted by a Third
Party

• Examples Ning, KickApps, Haystack
• Advantages
• Customizable (to a certain extent)
• Wide range of robust features/functionality
• Social noise can be avoided
• Do not have to scale/maintain collaborative
  aspects
• Disadvantages
• Still dont have complete control/customization
• Data privacy/ownership
• Advertising, potential fees
• Risks affiliated with vendors going out of
  business

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Build a Custom Social Network Hosted In-House

• Examples Elgg, Drupal, PHPizabi, Dolphin
• Advantages
• Complete control and customization
• Ownership of data
• Open source
• Advertisements and social noise can be avoided
• Less risk if vendor goes out of business
• Disadvantages
• Features arent always as robust or fully
  developed
• Must maintain, manage, scale collaborative
  aspects

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Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) Demonstrator

• Created a Facebook-based interface to provide
  users with access to cloud-based FDS
  simulation/visualization services
• A one-stop shop
• Upload/edit input files
• Submit/resubmit/execute simulations
• Share/visualize/download results
• Message boards

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Facebook-based GeoChronos

• GeoChronos CANARIE/Cybera funded project to
  create an on-line collaborative platform for
  earth observation scientists
• Developed initial Facebook-based prototype for
  accessing and sharing MODIS satellite data
• Create, edit and share subscriptions
• List and view details of subscriptions
• View thumbnails and metadata
• Message boards
• Evaluation
• Positive feedback from scientists
• Concern over customizability and social noise
• Concern over data ownership

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Ning-based GeoChronos

• Created a custom social network in Ning for
  GeoChronos
• Ported the MODIS application to Ning
• Evaluation
• Scientists liked more custom environment, but
  wanted even greater control over customization
• Scientists did not like advertisements
• Application API not as easy to work with as
  Facebook API
• Data ownership concerns

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Elgg-based GeoChronos

• Settled on Elgg
• Have incorporated tools for sharing spectral data
  and running applications on-line
• Evaluation
• Much more positive feedback
• Fully customizable
• Full ownership of data
• Wide range of features but not quite as polished
  as Facebook
• Usage
• Over 70 users from around the world
• IAI Summer School, July 2009
• Tropi-Dry community
• Registration currently restricted will open to
  the broader community by end of 2010

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Elgg-based GeoChronos
Interactive Application Service
Spectral Libraries
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Conclusions and Future Work

• Conclusions
• Custom in-house hosted social network suited
  needs for GeoChronos best
• Other approaches may be more suitable for other
  communities depending on their needs
• Future Work
• Plan to monitor usage/adoption to better evaluate
  impact of social networking
• Build more common reusable tools and services
  that leverage social networking and can be used
  in other gateways

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Contact Information
http//grid.ucalgary.ca/
http//geochronos.org/ info_at_geochronos.org
Cameron Kiddle kiddlec_at_cpsc.ucalgary.ca http//pag
es.cspc.ucalgary.ca/kiddlec/ http//twitter.com/k
iddlec