Where are we going and how are we going to get there?

1. GPS Technology 2. The Sony Walkman 3. The Bar code 4. TV Dinners 5. PlayStation Top 10 'inventions' 6. Social Networking that changed 7. Text messages the world 8. Electronic Money 9. Microwaves 10. Trainers JISC Accredited Trainers Scheme? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/4981964/Top-10-inventions-that-changed-the-world.html

linkeddata.org

Thanks to Carole Goble Duncan’s Research Environment LogBook Images Presentations Software Literature Compute resource His friends and colleagues Backup and Archive Data (files, spreadsheets)

“There are these great collaboration tools that 12- year-olds are using. It’s all back to front.” Robert Stevens

Virtual Learning The social process Environment Undergraduate Students of Science 2.0 1.0 Next Generation Researchers Digital Libraries scientists Graduate Students Reprints Peer- Reviewed Technical experimentation Journal & Conference Preprints Reports Papers & Metadata Local Web Data, Metadata, Repositories Provenance, Scripts, Certified Experimental Workflows, Services, Results & Analyses Ontologies, Blogs, ... Thanks to Simon Coles

My Seven Rs We want research to be: •Replayable – go back and see what happened •Repeatable – run the experiment again •Reproducible – new expt to reproduce results •Reusable – use as part of new experiments •Repurposeable – reuse the pieces in new expt •Replicatable – for scale and automation •Reliable – systematic, unbiased and robust

How do we move from heroic scientists doing heroic science with heroic infrastructure to everyday scientists doing science they couldn’t do before? humanists research archaeologists geographers musicologists ... researchers! It’s the democratisati on of e- Science! 

“A biologist would rather share their toothbrush than their gene name” Mike Ashburner and others Professor Genetics, University of Cambridge, UK “Data mining: my data’s mine and your data’s mine” Thanks to Carole Goble

You’re letting the No pedestrians oiks in!

You’re letting the No muggles muggles in!

The experiment that is Web 2 Social Network Open Repositories Researchers

Not Facebook for scientists! mySpace

 “Facebook for Scientists”  Open source (BSD) Ruby ...but different to Facebook! on Rails application with  A repository of research HTML, REST and SPARQL methods (an SGDL?) interfaces  A community social network  Project started March 2007 of people and things  Closed beta July 2007  A Social Virtual Research Environment  Open beta November 2007 myExperiment currently has 1800 registered users, 150 groups, 700 workflows, 200 files and 60 packs. Go to www.myexperiment.org to access publicly available content or create an account.

myExperiment Features  User Profiles  Groups  Friends  Sharing  Tags  Workflows  Developer interface  Credits and Attributions Distinctives  Fine control over privacy  Packs  Federation  Enactment

• Of the 661 workflows, 531 are publicly visible whereas 502 are publicly downloadable. • 3% of the workflows with restricted access are entirely private to the contributor and for the remaining they elected to share with individual users and groups. Scientists do share!  • 69 workflows (over 10%) have been shared, with the owner granting edit permissions to> Producers and Consumers > Curators specific users C groups. • In addition there are 52 instances where users have noted that a workflow is based on another workflow on the site. • The most viewed workflow has 1566 views. • There are 50 packs, ranging from tutorial examples to bundles of materials relating to specific experiments.

Six Principles of Software Design to Empower Scientists 1. Fit in, Don’t Force Change 1. Keep your Friends Close 2. Jam today and more jam 2. Embed tomorrow 3. Keep Sight of the Bigger 3. Just in Time and Just Picture Enough 4. Favours will be in your Favour 4. Act Local, think Global 5. Know your users 5. Enable Users to Add Value 6. Expect and Anticipate 6. Design for Network Effects Change De Roure, D. and Goble, C. "Software Design for Empowering Scientists," IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 88-95, January/February 2009

When proj ectsHarmful? Computer Scientists Considered g o bad... mentality • “Build it and they will come” – Second guessing requirements then going away and building well engineered solutions to problems people didn’t know they had and perhaps never will • Focusing on software not content • Assumption of benign environment and success as the norm (NB excludes security experts) • Prioritising the generic over the specific • Always coming up with a complicated solution (because they want to write a paper about it) • “Using jargon and being like totally patronising” • “What did they ever do that was useful anyway?”

Things we never want to hear • “Don’t worry about how to get those components working together, just use <buzzword > to fix that!” • “If you stop and think about how it works for a second, it makes complete sense!” • “Well, they should read the fantastic manual!” • “We don’t need to do any user testing. I’m a user and it works fine for me!” • “Why would you want to do that, in that way?” • “Why aren’t you doing that in the same way as them?” • “Remind me to lend you a copy of the Mythical Man Month” • “How can our users be so stupid? It’s so obvious!” Thanks to Neil Chue Hong

Don’t think rollout of technologies... Mass Use by Researchers Think roll-in of users... Mass Use by Researchers Knowledge co-production vs Service Delivery!

Where are we going and how are we going to get there? We’ve succeeded when people can routinely do things they want to do that they couldn’t do before, resulting in new learning and research* “Can I have a copy of your research object please?” Go on the journey with your “Computer says yes!” users and empower them. * Make sure you can measure this

Contact David De Roure dder@ecs.soton.ac.uk Carole Goble carole.goble@manchester.ac.uk See wiki.myexperiment.org Thanks Simon Coles, Duncan Hull, Neil Chue Hong, myExperiment team

References De Roure, D., Goble, C. and Stevens, R. (2009) The Design and Realisation of the myExperiment Virtual Research Environment for Social Sharing of Workflows. Future Generation Computer Systems 25, pp. 561-567. doi:10.1016/j.future.2008.06.010 De Roure, D. and Goble, C. (2009) "Software Design for Empowering Scientists," IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 88-95, January/February 2009. doi:10.1109/MS.2009.22 Carole Goble and David De Roure (2008) Curating Scientific Web Services and Workflows. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 5 (September/October 2008) http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/CuratingScie

Where are we going and how are we going to get there?

by David De Roure

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