Web 2.0 and Grids Workshop at OGF19

Web 2.0 and Grids Workshop at OGF19

This one day workshop, looking at the impact of Web 2.0 technologies and thinking on Grid and e-Science, was held on Monday January 29 at OGF19 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA, which ran from January 29 - February 2, 2007. The workshop featured a series of invited talks providing an introduction to the philosophy and technologies of Web 2.0 and its role in e-Science, and including an update on Semantic Grid activities - all with an emphasis on social networking and collaboration in the context of Grid and e-Science. The workshop presentations and papers are available below, linked from the Workshop Schedule. See the article in Grid Today.

Workshop Outcomes

See also the thoughts for discussion, which looks at grid from the perspective of the Web 2.0 Design Patterns.

1. Both Web 2.0 and Grid provide solutions for e-Science. Web 2.0 has particular benefits in enabling people to create and collaborate.
2. Aside from the capability of the technologies, there is a significant factor in the ease of use of Web 2.0 technologies - it enables people to build easily upon existing resources. This leads to greater participation and the benefits which result from that.
3. We see a role for Grid in providing a robust service behind the Web 2.0 APIs, and the attraction of the API ecosystem for ease of use - recognising that the incentive for use is not the API itself but the content behind it.
4. Workflows and mashups have a lot in common - a workflow is a kind of mashup. This relationship needs further exploration.
5. The original Semantic Grid report was written to observe the technology gap between Grid capability and e-Science requirements - if we wrote it now, it would feature Web 2.0.
6. We plan a white paper on Web 2.0 and Grids, and a workshop at OGF21 in October 2007.

Invited Speakers

• Carole Goble on myExperiment, a personalised environment which enables scientists to share, re-use and repurpose experiments. myExperiment is a very exciting initiative which owes far more to social networking websites such as MySpace and YouTube than to the traditional portals of Grid computing. See the New Scientist piece MySpace for the dudes in lab coats and Grid Today 'Me-Science' the New e-Science. Carole Goble has been a very significant force in the UK eScience programme since it started in 2001, leading the ^myGrid project, the largest e-Science pilot project. She's also Director of the UK's North West e-Science Centre. Her research group of 70 at Manchester covers theory and practice and she has been a major driver behind application of the Semantic Web from its outset. She was research director of the Knowledge Web network of excellence and is a leader of the Semantic Grid - she has produced the first reference architecture for the Semantic Grid through the OntoGrid project. Carole was Programme Chair for WWW2006 15th International World Wide Web Conference last year, and is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web.
• Noshir Contractor on How the science of social networks can inform - and be informed - by the Grid and Web 2.0. Noshir Contractor (www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/Nosh) is a Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Department of Psychology, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Research Affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Co-Director of the Age of Networks Initiative at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research program, funded continuously for the past decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, is investigating factors that lead to formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked knowledge in in 21st century organizational forms.
• Pamela Fox gave our Web 2.0 tutorial - Web 2.0 in the real world. Pamela, from USC and Google, was Winner of the Google Gadget Award - see here.

Workshop Schedule

The workshop was structured as follows:

2 page version of programme for printing

Monday, January 29 in the Dogwood room

Workshop Organizers

The workshop chair is David De Roure. This event is organised by the Semantic Grid Group (SEM-RG) in OGF in conjunction with the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences RG Group (HASS-RG), both part of the OGF eScience function.

Web page maintained by David De Roure, dder@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Last updated Tuesday, 08-May-2007 07:51:23 BST