e-Research South Quarterly Newsletter, June 2010

The June 2010 issue of the e-Research South quarterly newsletter has been published.  It is themed on Energy and contains information about new projects in this field, as well as announcements of the two new ReSC-led data projects MashMyData and BlogMyData.

View the newsletter here, from where you can also subscribe to future editions.

Registration now open for UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010

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.

AHM 2010 will begin on Monday 13th September with delegate registration.  The main conference programme will begin on Tuesday 14th September and end on Thursday 16th September. The conference will include presentations by groups from throughout the UK who are active in e-Science projects, as well as poster sessions, workshop sessions, project demonstrations and birds-of-a-feather sessions. 

The programme will also feature invited plenary  speakers, Professor Dan Atkins (University of Michigan, http://www.si.umich.edu/people/faculty-detail.htm?sid=2), Professor Alex Szalay (Johns Hopkins University, http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/people/faculty/szalay.html) and Professor Carole Goble (University of Manchester, http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~carole/).  We hope that this schedule of activities will provide a stimulating and engaging environment for all.

The registration page is now available at http://www.allhands.org.uk/registration.  We welcome delegates from all academic disciplines and industry who are currently engaged with e-Research or e-Science and those who have a growing interest in using e-Science to enhance their work.

For general enquiries about AHM 2010, please contact admin@allhands.org.uk.

Second Release Candidate of ncWMS 1.0 now available

We are pleased to announce the release of the second release candidate of version 1.0 of ncWMS, our Web Map Service implementation for NetCDF data, now available from http://ncwms.sf.net.

This version contains numerous bug fixes and improvements from previous versions, including:

• A refactored "core", which means that it is now much easier for ncWMS code to be reused in different settings, including THREDDS.
• Support for 360-day calendar systems (used in some climate simulations)
• An upgrade to version 4.1 of the NetCDF-Java libraries
• Improved handling of complex numerical grids

Click the image below to see ncWMS in action:

Comparing Quality Control of Argo Floats in the Global Ocean

With the benefit of acccess to some marine operational QC data via the work of Jim Cummings at FNMOC, we are seeking to understand
how the Argo delayed mode QC process compares with that of the operational centres. The former is a longer timescale and more
detailed process than the latter, but how different are the outcomes?

We have put the data in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database and
connected this to a web portal using OpenLayers to view the results on a map. As yet the portal is not online pending some further
development, but a presentation on the work can be seen below

A prototype Database and Web Portal for Comparing Argo Delayed Mode QC with that of Operational Centres (A. Gemmell) from IODE OceanTeacher on Vimeo.

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.