General information

There is a rightful consideration within the UK escience programme with regard to the long-term maintenance and development of grid middleware products developed by the programme. This has led to the establishment of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII) in Southampton. The OMII will be looking for key middleware products to take on for further development and long-term support. This meeting is called with the primary purpose of discussing whether there are important middleware tools for the environmental escience programme which should be candidates for the OMII.

Aim of the community discussion meeting

The aim of this one-day meeting is to discuss the core middleware tools currently being used by the environmental science community in order to identify any that could be put forward as candidates for long-term support by the OMII. The current portflio of environmental escience projects is quite diverse, with focus on both computational and data grid methods, and this will be the first time that the community has looked for commonality in the tools people use.

The meeting is being organised by Kerstin Kleese of the CCLRC Daresbury eScience Centre. Kerstin is involved in two of the NERC-funded escience projects, in addition to other escience projects funded by ESPRC and other organisations. Her particular interest is in data management.

Target participants

This discussion meeting is primarily aimed at those currently involved in the UK environmental escience programme, particularly (but by no means exclusively) those currently involved in the NERC-funded escience projects or their representatives.

Programme

The meeting will begin with registration and coffee at 10 am, and end with tea served between 16:00–16:30.

The programme begins with a presentation describing the role of the OMII, followed by presentations given by representatives of the various environmental escience projects. These will be focussed on the middleware tools their projects currently use. Each talk will be followed by a discussion.

The registration form (see below) is to be used for people to offer presentations, and to suggest topics for discussions. We would like to limit individual projects to one presentation per project, and we suggest that projects nominate a single representation. It also gives users an opportunity to list middleware tools they currently use, or which are are likely to be of interest in the near future.

Location

The workshop will take place in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge. Details of the location, including travel plans, can be obtained here.

Registration

There is no registration charge, but we need to ask people to pre-register. This should be done using our on-line form. Please book early, because we need to have early estimates of numbers for catering planning.

Contact and further information

For information about registration, and all other types of queries, please contact the NIEeS office in the first instance.