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e-Science

Better communication and sharing for scientists

Social networking for scientists: the National Institute for Environmental eScience (NIEeS) has developed scispace.net, a social network site for scientists. It is like MySpace and Facebook, but tailored specifically for the research community's needs. It has features such as individual profiles and tagging to enable potential collaborators to discover each other, blogs, wikis, bookmarks, comments, shared filespace and visualisation tools to document the exchange of ideas and results.

Multimedia resources: video conferencing from any desktop computer can improve collaboration, reduce travel time and minimize carbon emissions. The National Institute for Environmental eScience has contributed to a distributed computing system specifically designed to improve communications called the Access Grid.

Making it easier to use technology: the Reading e-Science Centre is developing tools and providing software to help scientists use e-Science infrastructure to run simulations and analyse very large environment and climate datasets. It has also developed new technology to visualize large, four-dimensional environmental data in web browsers and in geobrowsers such as Google Earth. The centre is collaborating with Google to use Google Earth to advertise and distribute scientific data more widely.

Making it easier to share information: the Reading e-Science Centre is working in collaboration with the NERC DataGrid to promote the use of open international standards in order to make it easier to integrate scientific data with other environmental information and to make it more usable and accessible by decision makers in government and industry.

Support from Microsoft: the GENIE project has received support from Microsoft to create a virtual framework that links all applications and data, regardless of the system used to create them.

e-Minerals making collaboration easier: the e-Minerals project has focused on making collaboration between its members easier.

• The team has developed tools to enable scientists to extract and share the information hidden within data, particularly for cases where not all partners understand the format in which the data are stored.
• The team wanted to make collaboration between scientists in remote locations feel as natural as if they were working in the next office. The team explored a wide range collaborative tools, including desktop video conferencing, application sharing tools and social networking tools (developed by the team) for sharing ideas and information.