East Midlands Conference Centre
Nottingham

2 September, 16.10–18.10

Background information

The National Institute for Environmental eScience (NIEeS) and the Reading eScience Centre are organising a "Birds of a Feather" session at the 2004 All Hands meeting in Nottingham.

Data management is a critical issue across the portfolio of environmental escience testbed projects. In some projects data management lies at the heart of the work, and for the others data management issues arise from the use of grid computing. Often the challenge is to extract key information from large observational datasets, and in other cases the main issues concern handling large and complex datasets produced by computer simulations. The datasets vary in many respects, in terms of both size and complexity, and this presents a challenge that is faced by all the current environmental escience projects.

This “Birds of a Feather” session will focus on data management problems faced in environmental science, with the emphasis being on articulating problems currently being faced by projects, and with discussion of possible solutions. To promote the discussion, we will assemble presenters from each of the five NERC environmental escience projects and related projects funded by other programmes. We will also solicit presentations from environmental agencies.

Session content

Each presenter will be expected to show three powerpoint slides and talk for no more than five minutes, with slides following the sequence (but with titles of the presenter's chosing):

1. The context of the data management issues – what kinds of data are being managed
2. One or two key problems currently being faced by the project (ideally where is not yet a proven solution in sight)
3. One or two successful solutions to problems encountered by the project, which might act as useful hints to other projects

The slides will need to be given to the organising group (the proposers) in advance, and used to formulate a set of discussion questions to be given in the session. These will be used to guide the discussion following presentations (which will be ordered and grouped according to the issues to be raised by the presenters).

We anticipate that the discussions will encompass projects’ experience and development of a number of key technologies and methodologies, such as:

1. Web and grid services to access and analyse/assimilate data
2. Use of portals for access to data
3. Visualisation of data
4. Use of storage resource brokers
5. Metadata definitions
6. Specific implementations of XML, both existing and in development

We expect that the discussion will also include potential applications of WSRF tools.

A detailed programme will appear nearer the time.

Session programme

Because the session will mostly consist of discussion (we hope) the times are tentative. The aim is for 5 mins per presenter and around 10 mins discussion per topic (average).

Further details

Please contact Stuart Ballard tel 01223 765669) for more information, or if you would like to offer a contribution to this session.