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Research
We have broken down the Research being undertaken in the e-infrastructure into the following areas. These areas will be greatly expanded upon as the project develops.
User Environment
The User Environment is where the Social Scientist will interact with e-Infrastructure services.
Services and Resources
Services include simulation tools to assist in decision-making in areas such as health and land-use policy, among others, as well as tools to assist in the annotation of research resources.
Support Materials
In order to promote uptake, we will be producing support materials in formats from word document to IMS Content Package. We will also be running workshops. These will be advertised on our News Page.
Reports
These include simulation tools to assist in decision-making in areas such as health and land-use policy, among others, as well as tools to assist in the annotation of research resources
Improving Social Science through e-Science
We are formulating and enacting a strategy to sustain this activity into the future to ensure that as many social scientists as possible can benefit from the productivity gains and new research insights that are possible when e-Science is enmeshed in the fabric of social science research.
User Environment
The user environment is the front-end to services held on the e-Infrastructure. There are three main elements to the user environment:
- A social science portal which provides a one-stop-shop for applications to assist in different aspects of social science, including tools for research (e.g. simulation models, new flexible and powerful geographical information systems) and collaboration (e.g. Wikis, forums and videoconferencing)
- Extensions to the functionality of statistics packages (e.g. R or Stata) through provision of a GROWL ODBC service to allow simultaneous access to multiple datasets for powerful on-line cross-dataset interrogation
- Workflows to demonstrate the power of tools that automate and speed up repeatable processes that form part of many social scientists' research work.
Of course, it is important to ensure that access to this user environment is secure, both in making sure that users are who they say they are and that they are authorised to access data and computers through the various applications that are available.
Services & Resources
Various applications first developed under the NCeSS Research Node programme are being further refined to allow them to be offered as more generic services so that more social scientists can reap the benefit of their use. These include simulation tools to assist in decision-making in areas such as health and land-use policy, among others, as well as tools to assist in the annotation of research resources (e.g. academic papers or survey results).
There is the potential to gain fascinating new insights through combining datasets that are usually only interrogated individually (they are not currently combined because of problems of lack of consistency between them such as in inconsistent geographical areas or different age ranges, or the fact that they are usually downloaded to be analysed on social scientists' workstations). This project will make available a number of datasets so that they can be integrated with greater flexibility.
Support Materials
In order to maximise use by social scientists of the services and resources we produce, we will produce a range of support materials, including clear and readable documentation, examples of use, on-line movies and workshops.
Reports
These include simulation tools to assist in decision-making in areas such as health and land-use policy, among others, as well as tools to assist in the annotation of research resources
Some social science data is highly sensitive because, whilst it is anonymous, there is a risk of revealing the people who are the source of this data. To comply with data privacy laws, there are currently a number of rooms that are configured in such a way to restrict access only to social scientists who can be trusted not to reveal the identity of subjects and to ensure that data cannot be taken from these secure rooms (which are known as 'Safe Settings'). Whilst these Safe Settings are effective in ensuring the privacy and anonymity of subjects, it may be possible to use e-Science technologies to provide the same security guarantees over the internet, which would be much more convenient and efficient, both for researchers who access them and for those who maintain them. Our study will examine the feasibility and critical success factors of virtual Safe Settings based on Grid technologies.
In order to discover which are the most appropriate social science related datasets for Grid-enabling (so that they can be combined and integrated to yield powerful new insights), we are conducting a thorough review of those that are most suitable. This will feed into work to Grid-enable a small number of datasets by this project, but will also create a roadmap for future work in this area.
It is vital that components within this project can be integrated with each other and also with other initiatives in the area of e-Science. This is the aim of technical standards. Some of our work is so innovative that it can contribute to standards definitions; some must conform to existing standards. We will conduct a review of technical standards used within the project.
Improving Social Science through e-Science
Although this project is producing a number of useful services and resources and making a start on the infrastructure to host them, there is much more that can be done. We are formulating and enacting a strategy to sustain this activity into the future to ensure that as many social scientists as possible can benefit from the productivity gains and new research insights that are possible when e-Science is enmeshed in the fabric of social science research.
We are developing the tools to conduct an on-going study to gauge our success in spreading awareness of e-social science and also conducting internal project evaluations to ensure we are achieving the best we can.
We believe that using e-Science technology in the near future will become as normal as using the internet or email is for social scientists today.