BlogMyData A Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data Andrew Milsted, Jeremy Frey Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton Jon Blower, Adit Santokhee Reading e-Science Centre, University of Reading

How do scientists collaborate day-to-day? Scholarly literature Face-to-face meetings Informal discussions Artefacts very basic: – PDFs – Static images “Lowest common denominator” approach Context is lost Preservation is ad-hoc

Combines web-based visualization… With a blog engine… To create a VRE for collaborative interpretation of data + = What do you think is going on Looks like a bug in the 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

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 Geo database 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 New_demonstration_video.html 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?