NEPTUNE Canada Workshop Oceans 2.0 Project Environment

1. NEPTUNE Canada WorkshopOceans 2.0 Project Environment NEPTUNE Canada DMAS TeamVictoria, BCFebruary 16, 2009

2. Outline of Oceans 2.0 Projects • Introduction • Scientist Feedback • Use Case • Project Description • Project Resources • Future Features • Discussion

3. Introduction • Oceans 2.0 Projects is conceptualized as an online environment for researchers, students and teams to develop projects from beginning to end, from data acquisition to final manuscript. • Funded by CANARIE Network-Enabled Platforms Program • Analogous with Web 2.0

4. Introduction • Expected Results • Ocean data interoperability between providers • Online environment for groups to interact, access data, perform data analysis and visualization • Remote control of instruments such as cameras and underwater vehicles • Measures for success: • Gathers significant fraction of ocean science community • Used to perform collaborative research across institutions • Interoperability allows scientists to work transparently with data from at least 3 distinct repositories

5. Introduction • We need new tools and methods to support collaborative work with large volumes of data. NEPTUNE Canada Computing System OR User’s Computing System ???

6. Scientist Feedback - Research Data • Flexible search criteria: raw or processed, single or multiple-sensors, complete or subset, location-based • Detailed and understandable metadata • Standard Format: NetCDF, ASCII, MAT • Visualizations: time series, maps, spectra, current/flux vectors, animations, multi-variable plots • Real-time displays “Need a way that is not excruciatingly painful to get information/metadata about an instrument."– Steve Mihaly

7. Scientist Feedback - Research • Data Processing & Visualization Resources • Video/Image annotation tools • Routines for calibration, statistics, plotting, interpolating, etc • Scheduling of routines • QA/QC flags • Integration of external products • Instrument Control • Event Detection and Response "How will we deal with all that data in a meaningful way? I don't have a clue! – Maycira Costa"

8. Scientist Feedback - Teaching • Rich media for classroom presentations • Virtual field trips • Online resource for labs or projects • Automated marking tools • Tutorials/templates for generating and interpreting plots • Tools for writing labs or projects

9. Scientist Feedback - Collaborations • Permissions-based shared virtual environments • Document and image management • Shared repository and communications for manuscript revisions • Discussions about instruments, projects, experiments • Initiation of new projects in public discussions • Better sharing and documentation of methods and techniques (avoid re-inventing the wheel)

10. Scientist Feedback - Outreach How can we help you promote your research? • Online links to your published papers • Summaries of you research in simple language for broad audiences • Rich media (e.g. podcasts, video, Flash, 3-D visualizations) • Blogs linked to prominent sites (e.g. CBC Science) • Ongoing workshops (like this one) to explore new ways of doing and teaching science • How else?

11. Use Case • The design of Oceans 2.0 Project Environment is based on the process users would take to fulfill their goals.

12. Project Description • This collaborative work-space is a management and work-flow system for project-relevant: • sensors & instruments • data search parameters • data processing scripts • discussion • data products (figures, processed data) • manuscript revisions • resources (papers, links, etc) and more

13. Project Resources All projects will have access to NEPTUNE Canada’s processing power and repositories of: • published scripts (versioned, searchable) • script templates to help users get started • publications involving NEPTUNE Canada’s data and/or data collection regions [Lack of skills/experience/strategies for dealing with large amounts of data] “could create a sort of inertia that would prevent people from moving forward.” – Diana Varela

14. Future Features • Project hierarchy (ability to have subprojects) • User message subscription handling • Expanded data search options • Document versioning • Data products linked to source search or script • Script scheduling • Additional analysis tools (e.g.,R)

15. Future Features • Publishing code to NEPTUNE Canada script library • Data Product Group Management: by source code or user-created (e.g., “Manuscript Figures”) • Reference management tools • Help resources "There is no possible way to anticipate everything that people will think of to do with the data.” – Jim Christian

16. Discussion • Actual Work flow vs Project Tree View • Limitations – proprietary data analysis software, integration with other data sets, etc • Other use cases – classroom projects, sensor experts sharing QA knowledge, etc. • What tools are wanted – Matlab toolboxes, other environments (R, SigmaPlot, etc.) • "We need to be open to the idea that initial requirements will evolve over time. We are all learning as we go along. We need to help users become aware of the possibilities that are available, training them to understand these new ways of interacting with information technologies.” – Kim Juniper