Keynote - Peter Fox

Progress in Open-World, Integrative, Transparent, Collaborative Science Data Platforms

As collaborative, or network science spreads into more science, engineering and medical fields, both the participants and their funders have expressed a very strong desire for highly functional data and information capabilities that are a) easy to use, b) integrated in a variety of ways, c) leverage prior investments and keep pace with rapid technical change, and d) are not expensive or time-consuming to build or maintain. In response, and based on our accumulated experience over the last decade and a maturing of several key semantic web approaches, we have adapted, extended, and integrated several open source applications and frameworks that handle major portions of functionality for these platforms. At minimum, these functions include: an object-type repository, collaboration tools, an ability to identify and manage all key entities in the platform, and an integrated portal to manage diverse content and applications, with varied access levels and privacy options. At the same time, there is increasing attention to how researchers present and explain results based on interpretation of increasingly diverse and heterogeneous data and information sources. With the renewed emphasis on good data practices, informatics practitioners have responded to this challenge with maturing informatics-based approaches. These approaches include, but are not limited to, use case development; information modeling and architectures; elaborating vocabularies; mediating interfaces to data and related services on the Web; and traceable provenance. The current era of data-intensive research presents numerous challenges to both individuals and research teams. In environmental science especially, sub-fields that were data-poor are becoming data-rich (volume, type and mode), while some that were largely model/ simulation driven are now dramatically shifting to data-driven or least to data-model assimilation approaches. These paradigm shifts make it very hard for researchers used to one mode to shift to another, let alone produce products of their work that are usable or understandable by non-specialists. However, it is exactly at these frontiers where much of the exciting environmental science needs to be performed and appreciated. XVIII Research networks (even small ones) need to deal with people, and many intellectual artifacts produced or consumed in research, organizational and/our outreach activities, as well as the relations among them. Increasingly these networks are modeled as knowledge networks, i.e. graphs with named and typed relations among the 'nodes'. Some important nodes are: people, organizations, datasets, events, presentations, publications, videos, meetings, reports, groups, and more. In this heterogeneous ecosystem, it is important to use a set of common informatics approaches to co-design and co-evolve the needed science data platforms based on what real people want to use them for. We present our methods and results for information modeling, adapting, integrating and evolving a networked data science and information architecture based on several open source technologies (e.g. Drupal, VIVO, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network; CKAN, and the Global Handle System; GHS) and many semantic technologies. We discuss the results in the context of the Deep Carbon Virtual Observatory and the Global Change Information System, and conclude with musings on how the smart mediation among the components is modeled and managed, and its general applicability and ecacy.

Biography:
Peter Fox is Tetherless World Constellation Chair, Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Computer Science, and Director of the Information Technology and Web Science Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Fox has a B.Sc. (hons) and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (physics and computer science) from Monash Univsersity. Previously, he spent 17 years at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research as Chief Computational Scientist. His research covers the fields of solar and solar-terrestrial physics, ocean and environmental informatics, computational and computer science, and distributed semantic data frameworks. The results are applied to large-scale distributed data science investigations. This research utilizes state-of-the-art modeling techniques, internet-based technologies, including the semantic web, and applies them to large-scale distributed scientific repositories addressing the full life-cycle of data and information within specific science and engineering disciplines as well as among disciplines. Fox is chair of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics Union Commission on Data and Information and serves on the editorial boards of many prominent Earth and space science informatics journals. Fox was awarded the 2012 European Geoscience Union, Ian McHarg/Earth and Space Science Informatics Medal and the Earth Science Information Partner's Martha Maiden Lifetime Achievement award for service to the Earth Sciences Information communities.