Research Fellow - Semantic eInfrastructure for Social Sciences
Computing Science
University of Aberdeen
The PolicyGrid project within the Department of Computing Science invites applications for the above post, to work on a new eInfrastructure activity funded by the ESRC eSocial Science Programme.
PolicyGrid (www.policygrid.org) is one of the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) National Centre for eSocial Science research nodes. The ESRC has recently committed to the construction of an e-Infrastructure on the UK National Grid Service (NGS) to provide integrated access to a variety of resources for social science research, including datasets, tools, services and easy-to-use user environments.
The post holder will focus on the development of Grid services and software tools in the context of the metadata infrastructure and simulation workpackages of the ESRC eInfrastructure effort. These include (but are not restricted to) the following: making an existing natural language interface for creation of RDF metadata robust, pluggable and usable; developing a Grid based metadata/ontology infrastructure; simulation portal development; Grid-enabling social simulation models. The work will entail extensive collaboration with other sites involved in the eInfrastructure project, and regular access grid, telephone and face-to-face conferences. There will be a requirement to produce documentation throughout the project, to include: regular progress updates, workpackage reviews, software tool documentation.
You should have a PhD in Computer Science or a related discipline. You are expected to be a highly competent programmer in Java, and have experience of Semantic Web technologies (including OWL and RDF), Web/Grid services, e-science, and related areas. Knowledge of workflow approaches in e-science would be desirable. The work will involve development of robust software, within a managed project environment; it is therefore important that you have knowledge and experience of software engineering principles and standards.
The post is being offered for 21 months and is available immediately.
Salary range: £27,857 - £33,262 per annum
Closing Date: 24-Aug-2007
For further information and to apply online:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/jobs/display.php?recordid=YCS060RX
Web2.0 & e-Social Science
Workshop at e-Social Science 2007
October 7-9, Ann Arbour, Michigan, USA
Call for Position Papers
Goals & Objectives
In recent years, the concept of the so-called "Social Web" has emerged
that is similar to the World Wide Web but, instead of linking documents,
links people, organizations, and concepts. It describes the
collaborative effort of users to make sense of and provide context to
the Internet. The term Web2.0 has emerged, not as a new version of the
internet, but as a new way of using it, facilitating collaboration and
sharing between users. Web2.0 is associated with blogs and wikis where
users can keep publicly available online diaries (a new medium for
project diaries?) and volunteer contributions to online encyclopaedias
such as Wikipedia. Social network sites such as MySpace allow users to
create a profile listing their likes, dislikes and favourites (in music,
videos, etc.). This stimulates the emergence of networks of friends and
people with similar interests. Social tagging, where users tag resources
with keywords coined by themselves, has been applied to photos, websites
and academic papers, amongst others. The social bookmark and publication
sharing systems BibSonomy and Connotea allow users to tag websites and
publications and to share these tags with other members of the
community. The tags can be used to search for resources that other
people have tagged, thus providing a different (more effective and
user-centric) way of searching the internet.
We invite position papers on the following topics:
1. The role Web2.0 technologies play in delivering enhanced e-social
science tools. Bibsonomy and Connotea stimulate collaboration by
enabling users to easily share interesting publications, websites etc.
We wish to explore in which other ways Web2.0 technologies can be used
to support e-social science.
2. The role of Web2.0 tools as social science research tools in their
own right. How can wikis, blogs, etc. be used to gather information, as
alternatives to the more classic methods of interviews and
questionnaires?
3. Studies of Web2.0 environments and communities. Web2.0 communities
are interesting phenomena in their own right; we are interested in
studies into the social aspects of these phenomena.
Intended Participants
This workshop is intended for participants working or interested in the
cross-over areas between e-social science and Web2.0 mentioned above.
Programme/Format
The workshop will comprise one keynote presentation, plus a series of
short presentations on submitted position papers (20 mins duration)
addressing one or more of the themes above. The event will conclude with
a discussion/agenda-setting session.
Position papers (max. two A4 pages in length) should be sent to the
workshop organisers by email to the following addresses:
csc287(a)abdn.ac.uk, a.h.chorley(a)abdn.ac.uk
Important Dates
August 27 Submission deadline
August 31 Notification
October 7 Workshop
Workshop Registration
Workshop participants must register for e-Social Science 2007
(http://ess.si.umich.edu/index.htm)
Dear all--
Below please find the announcement for this year's GCE workshop. I would appreciate everyone's assistance with promotion of this event, so please forward this to your colleagues and to other appropriate email lists.
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GCE WORKSHOP FOR SUPERCOMPUTING 2007
The Grid Computing Environments (GCE) workshop, now in its third year, provides the science gateway community with a dedicated forum for presenting new research, development, and deployment efforts. We welcome paper submissions on all topics related to science portal development. As in previous years, the workshop format will be presentations of peer-reviewed short papers.
The workshop website is http://www.collab-ogce.org/gce07/index.php/Main_Page.
WORKSHOP FOCUS: GATEWAYS AND WEB 2.0
Scientific portals and gateways have emerged as an important components of many large-scale scientific computing and Grid projects. They provide Web based access interfaces to secure Grid resources, services, applications, tools, and collaboration services for communities of scientists. In most cases access is enabled through a Web browser without the need to download or install specialized software or worry about network and firewall issues. As a result, the science application user is insulated from the complex details and infrastructure needed to operate an application on the Grid.
Gateways and Cyberinfrastructure will be heavily influenced by the so-called Web 2.0 trends in Internet computing. Ajax, JSON, folksonomies, social networking, mash-ups, REST, RSS/Atom feeds, and other developments run parallel to much that has occurred in the Gateway community. It is timely to examine these approaches, the impact that they will have on the next generation of Gateways, and the limits of these approaches. The GCE workshop thus strongly encourages the submission of relevant papers.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
GCE 2007 topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Integration of Web 2.0 technologies with science gateways.
* Grid Portals and Gateways Deployments (including User Portals, Application Portals, Science Gateways, Education Portals, User interface/usability studies).
* Design and architecture of Grid portals, portal containers, and gateways
* Tools and frameworks that make developing Grid Portals and gateways easier.
* Portal security models and solutions.
* Middleware solutions in support of scientific portals and Gateways including Web Services; Grid technologies; Databases; Workflows; WSRP and other standards;
* Interaction with Commodity and Commercial tools such as Perl, Python, Matlab, and Mathematica.
* Interaction with Desktop applications.
* Summary papers that review a number of useful tools.
