Learning Space Catalogue Categories
The Learning Space Catalogue is a collection of e-Science training and awareness raising resources in a variety of formats from multimedia video to pdf documents. These resources are aimed at Social Scientists (although some resources may be useful for other disciplines). Their aim is to introduce Social Science researchers to new technologies that will benefit their research.
To enables users to find content that is of interest, all content is placed into one or more categories. The categories are listed below along with brief descriptions of the category. The meaning of the terms highlighted in red in these descriptions can be found by clicking on the term. The term definitions have been obtained from the ReDReSS Grid Acronyms page and Wikipedia. Click on the category title to view all content in this category using the Learning Space catalogue viewer tool. This tool also has filtering, sorting and searching facilities. It presents each resource along with descriptions and other information (metadata) such as authors and publishers. A link to the each resource is also provided.
Below you will also find a simple search form that allows you to search the information describing each resource (the metadata) to find resources of interest.
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Select this link to browse all of the Learning Space Catalogue content. -
Introductory Material and Support
An introduction to e-Social Science and the ReDRESS project and how this project fits into the support offered by the NCeSS hub and nodes. e-Science technology is introduced, together with some of the organisations that are working to extend e-Science for Social Science research or are active in e-Science including NeSC. This section is very basic but includes links to related projects in other disciplines. -
Motivation and Background
A section describing why e-Social Science may provide new research opportunities or make existing research more efficient and effective. It contains illustrations of the limitations of conventional approaches to Social research, particularly in the area of large-scale social modeling. It shows examples of how e-Social Science technology has already been applied with some success to a number of projects and why it is promising and worthwhile to pursue for others. -
Examples from e-Social Science Projects
In 2003 the ESRC funded 11 pilot demonstrator projects to provide examples of e-Social science. These examples cover many topics, e.g. the analysis of financial time series, database management and data mining of distributed data, econometric and statistical modeling, spatial planning, environmental modeling, visualization and video and collaborative analysis. More recently the ESRC funded NCeSS (Hub) 7 Nodes to develop more extensive examples of e-Social Science. -
(Agenda Setting) Workshops
This section contains information about a range of thematic workshops organised by the ReDRESS and other Lancaster projects and a series of agenda setting workshops via Nottingham University. These workshops are aimed at defining requirements for e-Social Science research and target both development of training content and of middleware and tool development. Other relevant workshops as organised by NCeSS hub or nodes may also feature in this section. Many of the workshops are accompanied by audio-visual material recorded at the event in addition to downloadable slides. -
UK e-Science Programme
An introduction is given to the activities of the UK e-Science programme managed by the Research Councils and DTI. It focuses on the organisations of this programme and illustrates some of the middleware developed and deployed and projects carried particularly in the natural sciences. - Collaboration
Collaboration in research creates new opportunities. In addition to the telephone and e-mail systems e-Science brings a new suite of tools aimed at increasing the intensity, efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative research. New tools such as Access Grid and Sakai will be described, these tools are aimed at making world wide interdisciplinary collaboration a real possibility (time zones permitting!). Collaboration brings benefits by enabling more complex and multi-disciplinary Grand Challenge problems to be tackled, but also brings an increased management load and IPR issues with multiply geographically dispersed partners and institutions. Some problems and solutions are highlighted. -
Data Management
Data management comprises of all activities required to collect, store, modify and use data as a valuable resource. This category provides information about the more technical aspects of handling data. Of particular and growing importance is the use of meta-data. This is typically a set of mark-up tags in XML with agreed names which may intersperse the actual data or be kept in a separate file. Classical separated meta-data includes a description, provenance and how to obtain the actual data. Included meta-data might refer to the format and meaning. This leads into information and knowledge management, semantics, and is an exciting new area of development greatly facilitating sharing and re-using data and its interpretation in diverse applications and tools. -
Semantics, Knowledge and Information Management
Knowledge management activities are undertaken to ensure that knowledge gained remains accessible and stored for future use. The need for research and educational communities to effectively manage the information and knowledge gained across evolving projects has long been recognised. It is possible that a well-managed information and knowledge resource can contribute to improving their ultimate efficiency and productivity as has been recognised in large commercial organizations Knowledge Management is about making the best use of intellectual capital and is critical to a community's sustained success by preserving the intellectual capital, transferring knowledge and experience, and encouraging continual learning. Current knowledge management tools as applied to e-Social Science are in their infancy but involve the extension of meta-data and information management tools. Digital repositories are becoming an important instrument in the curation of digital information. -
Databases
This chapter provides an entry in to large range of databases and data suppliers with data relevant for the social sciences. Database technologies are introduced at a rather simplistic level as this is a large field with may available books. The generic databases services available on the Grid (for instance Oracle on the National Grid Service) are identified and information on how to use these services is provided. The available national data sets and data centres (such as MIMAS and UK-DA) are also described in an overview with links to specific offerings and services. Finally the JISC Information Environment Service Registry is described. This gives an entry into many catalogues of data provided by the IE and includes resources such as SOSIG on the RDN. -
Social Shaping
Despite the large investment in grid technologies, little is known about how, why and by whom this technology is being adopted, nor do we know what the impact of this technology will be on the nature and conduct of research and the community at large. It is important for society to have some understanding of this process. -
Visualisation
Humans are visual beings; more than 80% of the stimuli we perceive are visual in nature. Visualisation therefore plays a key role in providing the ability of our brains to interpret data, information and research results. Computer-supported human-to-human and machine-to-human communication must be made as easy as possible, with current research emphasis on providing interactive tools. New ways of exploring data, such as using 3D virtual reality (for instance in an enhanced Access Grid Cave) are described with examples relevant to Social Science. -
Software Development
Software can be purchased, downloaded as Freeware or Open Source or developed in-house. This section aims to give an insight in Open Source software, which on many occasions provides alternatives to expensive commercially available software and its continuing development and known issues. Some examples of relevance to e-Social Science, for instance in statistical analysis are given. The section also discusses software development best practices, including architecture, planning, development life-cycle, testing and project management. The also provides access to documents regarding in-house software development, with a specific emphasis on Grid enabling software. Other aspects of application development, such as new algorithm development, parallelisation and optimisation are dealt with in the section on High Performance Computing. -
Portals and Related Technology
A portal provides access to manipulate an application or "active" Grid services from a Web browser. That means you can access a portal from nearly every computer in the world which has a browser and internet access. Some portals are also accessible to PDA, mobile phones and other devices. Many project are developing "portlets" as interfaces to specific or generic tools for a range of tasks including data management, Grid computing and collaboration. Users make a choice from the available tools/portlets depending on their particular activity and arrange and personalise them in their portal. The portlet technologies and portal frameworks are described in this section with examples of particular relevance to e-Social Science. -
High Performance Computing
An introduction into the development of computing and where it might evolve to in the future. This category provides access to material ranging from capabilities of the first computers through to those of tomorrow's systems. The emphasis is placed on the capabilities of computers and how these can be used in the Social Sciences. The bulk of the section gives examples of programming and optimising typical applications for current parallel computers using MPI, OpenMP and a variety of high-performance libraries for numerical algorithms. Links to open source libraries and HPC applications are provided. -
Security and Confidentiality
Traditionally an aspect of security is concerned with keeping valuables safe via mechanical solutions (such as bank safe where the owner holds the key). To make data and applications widely available and re-usable bank vaults (and firewalls) are no use. In today's electronic world logical solutions have to address the security of our data and applications. The Grid's security depends on a range of software solutions authentication (actually identity management) and authorisation underpinned by cryptography with secret passwords. This chapter provides an overview of the techniques used in computer systems and applications ensuring that even in a multi-institution Grid computing environment data, communication and applications are guaranteed to meet a specific quality of reliable security and confidentiality. This includes issues of usability, such as confidentiality and validation.The risk of intrusion and tampering cannot be completely eliminated, thereby putting an emphasis on early detection, correction and damage limitation to handle hacking attempts. -
Grid and Web Services
This section deals with both what Grid and Web services are available to end users (such as the National Grid Services), and what technologies are used to deploy and access them. It is widely agreed that a Web service is a simple means of calling a remote procedure on a server in the same way that a Web browser might download a Web page without any login. Grid services take this a stage further by providing personalisable services which keep state and are able to respond to a sequence of procedure calls to carry out complex procedures on behalf of a particular user. Grid services use the security mechanisms presented in the previous chapter. Examples are given of Grid-enabled data sets and applications and how to use them. -
Network Technology
Network technology, and more generically "communication technology", underpins most aspects of our daily lives. Wired computer networks enable high bandwidth communications for the transfer of e-mail, data, images, Web information and applications. Broadband is now used in many homes for this purpose and increasingly for access to on-line radio,TV and interactive games with many users worldwide. It could be said that the leisure industry is driving down the cost of networking, enabling the Grid to be developed into a high performance and responsive infrastructure for research and collaboration. In the field or radio networking another example is the use of mobile phones which are fundamentally changing the ways in which humans interact with one another. These are important examples of social shaping from which we must learn lessons of how to deploy and access research tools. An overview of network technology is provided with examples of how it can be used now and in the future. Links are provided for more detailed technical information, for instance on multicast networking used in Access Grid.
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