BlogMyDataA Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data

Andrew Milsted, Jeremy FreyDepartment of Chemistry, University of Southampton

Jon Blower, Adit SantokheeReading e-Science Centre, University of Reading

How do scientists collaborateday-to-day?

• Scholarly literature• Face-to-face meetings• Informal email discussions

• Artefacts very basic:– PDFs– Static images

• “Lowest common denominator” approach

• Context is lost• Preservation is ad-hoc

http://www. .org

• Combines web-based visualization…

• With a blog engine…• To create a VRE for

collaborative interpretation of data

www.rdg.ac.uk/godiva2

+ =blogs.chem.soton.ac.uk

@Keith: What do you think

is going on here?

@Tom: Looks like a bug in

the model.

@Harry: Could be a bad

observation. I’ll overlay

the obs database.

4

Godiva2• Interactively explore 4D

geospatial raster datasets on the web

• ~40 datasets– Research data,

operational forecasts, satellite products

• Images generated dynamically for maximum flexibility

• Hides technical complexity of the data from the users

http://www.reading.ac.uk/godiva2http://ncwms.sf.net

The blog (LabTrove)• Web-based blogging tool specifically

designed for the practising scientist– Originally designed for lab chemist

• Collaboration tool for enabling discussions– Blogs can be private or public

• Colleagues add comments and link blog posts together

• Version-controlled– Nothing can be deleted, but can be

updated

• Sophisticated metadata framework– We added geo-tagging

LabTrove

Geodatabase

Godiva2 sites

RSS

GeoRSS

Illustrative use cases

• Postdoc/PhD student:– Discover an interesting feature in a dataset– Post a blog entry asking a question

• Colleague at a different institute– Discovers others working on same dataset and/or same

geographic area– Discovers blog entry, posts explanatory comment

• PI/Manager:– Views “hot topics” feed (most active discussions)

Feature summary• Create blog entries about different kinds of visualizations

– Chiefly map plots and animations so far

• Doesn’t store any data: just metadata and links

• Can highlight a point of interest– “What’s going on at this location?”

• Lots of metadata automatically captured– User dataset, variable, plot type– Geospatial and temporal context– Posts can be filtered on this metadata– Original visualization can be regenerated

• Proof of concept! (for now)

• Demo video: see http://blogs.blogmydata.org/projectblog/398/New_demonstration_video.html

Metadata captured automatically and used in filtering

Click on screenshot to load data in Godiva2

User feedback guided development

• Privacy controls essential– We could give even more control in future

• “Content is king”– Prototype system needs to contain interesting

data!

• Animations difficult to handle but big attraction for users

13

Future work• Prototype was developed quickly: needs

“hardening”• Increase the number of plot types

– Vertical profiles, timeseries• Improve playback of animations in browsers

– HTML5???• Improve use of filtering

– E.g. “Who else is working on density anomalies in the North Atlantic?”

– What are the hot topics of the last week?• KML and GeoRSS output for all types of

visualization– E.g. for Google Earth overlays

• Finer-grained security?