Today, I’m at the ESON12 workshop, Analyzing and Improving Collaborative eScience with Social Networks, part of the IEEE eScience conference.
Mike Conlon, from the University of Florida, is the Principal Investigator on the VIVO project.
The research process is far more collaborative than it used to be. Every science team forms virtual organizations, but they don’t have the tools for forming and managing them.
Six trends that are changing science:
1. Rise of the small – we don’t study patients, we study molecules. Metabalomics, micro biome. Every time we gene sequence of the gut, 80% of what we find is new.
2. In casing volume of science.
3. Increasing complexity of scientific problems – not just technically, but socially.
4. Data reuse grows. Metabalomics project proposed in UK that will generate 100 petabytes of data. In human research, data is very difficult to reproduce.
5. Competition rises – Shanghai ranking of world universities is becoming a standard.
6. Internet disintermediation of science continues. The rise of instrumented, real-time analysis.
How can we know what is going on, build teams, solve problems? Research Discocery – instrument science so we can understand the relationships between things.
About 100 institutions using VIVO now, representing about a million people. 1300 classes in the VIVO ontology, incorporating standard ontologies where possible. Currently working on a collaborative project with Eagle-I to represent research resources.
VIVO is linked open data, represented in RDF.
Nosher Contractor at Northwestern is building recommender software based on VIVO data.
They’re building cross-site search software, which will work with VIVO, Harvard Profiles, Elsevier’s SciVal Experts, etc.
CERFNET is ingested in the combination of InCommon and VIVO. VIVO is Shibbolized.
A layer of data to us support a wide variety of things. Many uses for finding people – scientists finding each other, fund ears, mentors, press, etc.
Selling point – democratization of data. A level playing field, where scientists control their own data.
Oren Sreebny 