UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010: call for abstract submission

The ninth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2010) will be held at the City Hall, Cardiff, from 13-16 September 2010.

The meeting provides a forum in which information on e-Science projects from all disciplines can be communicated and where the capabilities being developed within projects can be demonstrated.

Authors are invited to submit abstracts of unpublished, original work of not more than 3 pages in length using single spaced 10 point size on A4 pages - including 2 pages of text and (optionally) 1 page of figures and tables.

Authors are asked to submit to one of the following Themes, or as a 'general paper':

• Theme 1: Infrastructures, Systems and Tools for e-Research    
• Theme 2: Algorithms and Data Structures for e-Research
• Theme 3: Applications of e-Research
• Theme 4: Foundations of e-Science/e-Research
• Theme 5: Organisation, Trust, Security and Validation
• Theme 6: Sharing, Collaboration and Interfaces for e-Research

This year, we would especially like to encourage industry collaborators to engage fully in the conference, including contributing to papers.

As in previous years, selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers to be considered for inclusion in a special edition of a high-quality journal (details to be confirmed).  Abstracts will otherwise not be published as part of the conference.

Submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the Programme Committee and categorised under one of the following:

• Invitation to submit a full paper for possible inclusion in the Special Issue and inclusion as a presentation.
• Inclusion as a presentation only.
• Inclusion as a poster only.
• Not suitable for inclusion

IMPORTANT DATES:

*14 May 7 June 2010* - Deadline for abstract submission (extended)

*23 July 2010 *- Decisions to authors

Please visit the AHM 2010 website for further information: http://www.allhands.org.uk/abstracts

GIS in the cloud: A Web Map Service on Google App Engine

Cloud computing might be a useful method for hosting web services in a reliable, scalable environment.  Google App Engine (GAE) is an unusual cloud system in that it provides an application hosting environment rather than a "bare" operating system.  GAE applications scale automatically in response to increasing load, and usage of this cloud is free up to a certain set of quotas.

Attracted by these qualities, and motivated by a need to develop a fast and reliable Web Map Service (WMS) for base maps, we have performed an investigation of the suitability of GAE for hosting a WMS.  Full details, including a paper we have submitted to COM.Geo 2010, can be found at http://code.google.com/p/gae-wms/.

New project: BlogMyData

BlogMyData will combine two existing systems to create a new Virtual Research Environment for environmental scientists. By combining the capabilities of an online environmental data visualization system with a sophisticated blogging and collaboration engine, we will create a new facility for scientists to collaborate on important tasks of data interpretation, focusing on the diagnosis of the latest cutting-edge numerical simulations of the climate and oceans.  The HiGEM community will be our first guinea-pigs.

This project is a collaboration between the ReSC and the Chemistry Department of the University of Southampton. It is funded by JISC under the Virtual Research Environment Rapid Innovation theme, and was enabled by the e-Research South platform grant.

As you might imagine, this project has its own blog.  This picture illustrates the main components of the proposed system.  More details can be found in the project proposal.

New project: MashMyData

The MashMyData project will develop a proof-of-concept web portal to demonstrate the intercomparison of environmental datasets on the web. We will use the latest Web GIS technologies to allow scientists to visualize and intercompare datasets without the need to understand the low-level technical details of the data's format or physical location. Test case scientists will be able to simultaneously visualize data from many sources, including their own uploaded data, data shared by their colleagues and third-party datasets (both public and restricted-access), as well as being able to perform simple quantitative comparison calculations, such as calculating the misfit between a numerical model and a set of observations over a user-selected region of space and time.

This project is a collaboration between the ReSC and the Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA). It is funded by NERC under the Technologies Proof of Concept programme.