The Anthropology of Knowledge:

From basic to complex virtual communities in the Arts and Humanities

Stuart Dunn & Tobias Blanke

Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre

King’s College London

DH2007

Urbana-Champaign, 5th June 2007

Discovery

AttributionReference and cross-reference

Interpretation

Publication

The Archaeological research cycle

Web 2.0

Visual/cartographic/ Browse and click

1

Keyword/natural language/controlled vocabulary searching

2

3

Mixture of 1 and 2; georeferencing

4

Wiki/blog structures

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Running average of change in 12 mo over the last 24 mo (%)

0

100000

200000

300000

400000

500000

600000

700000

800000

Oct-00Jan-01Apr-01Jul-01Oct-01Jan-02Apr-02Jul-02Oct-02Jan-03Apr-03Jul-03Oct-03Jan-04Apr-04Jul-04Oct-04Jan-05Apr-05Jul-05Oct-05Jan-06Apr-06Jul-06Oct-06Jan-07Apr-07Jul-07Oct-07Jan-08Apr-08Jul-08Oct-08Jan-09Apr-09Jul-09Oct-09Jan-10Apr-10Jul-10Oct-10Jan-11

Number of collections available by month scaled to raw access stats.

Archaeology Data Service

SILCHESTER ROMAN TOWN: A VIRTUAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT FOR ARCHAEOLOGY

Integrated Archeological Database (IADB)

LEAP project (Linking E-Archives and Publications)http://www.intarch.ac.uk/

Collaborative working environments

• Open Source Critical Editions

Collaborative working environments

• Open Source Critical Editions

Collaborative working environments

• Open Source Critical Editions

Collaborative working environments

• Open Source Critical Editions

• Open Source Critical Editions

Collaborative working environments

E-SCIENCE IN THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES: AN EARLY ADOPTERS’ FORUM

NCSA, 1&2 June 2007

VOs for the Arts and Humanities: A shopping list

Web 2.0 and the Grid

- ‘mashups’ - infrastructural diversity

- Interactive infrastructure

Formal methods for defining, storing and accessing (i.e. reusing) workflows

Project management

-Training

-Legal

-Reporting and documenting failure

Development and enrichment of the relationship between A&H and Computer Science

International coordination and collaboration

Dealing with computational, semantic and human heterogeneity

Supporting collective research –

virtual organizations

Foster/Kesselman: Virtual Organisation scenarios

• Highly multidisciplinary simulation with several proprietary software components

• Thousands of researchers at hundreds of laboratories work together on the same design and pool their resources

• A large scale computer game with multiple interacting virtual worlds

Different number and types of participants, types of activities, scale of interaction and sharing of resources

Common: Mutually independent participants would like to work together and share what they have

VO: A set of institutions and/or individuals defined by resource sharing policies

• Sharing relationships can vary over time– Access rights– Resources involved– Participants

• Peer-to-peer• Different usage of the same resource, no a

priori definition• Implementation must be flexible and user

controlled in terms of varying policies, identities etc.

• Delegation of authority

Some initial challenges

VOs in Grids

Ability to negotiate resource-sharing arrangements and then to use the resulting resource pool for some purpose. (Ian Foster)

Grid: VO management

Before VOMS• Remember the way to

Athens • User is authorized as a

member of a single VO• All VO members have

same rights

VOMS• User can be in multiple

VOs– Aggregate rights

• VO can have groups– Different rights for

each– Nested groups

• VO has roles– Assigned to specific

purposes

Virtual Organisation

Examples

Platform for A&H Computing Community

• Existing technologies:– Wiki– Blog– Content Management System (CMS)– Forum

• Existing problems:– Lack of resources– Security

Solution: Self-governing community using web2.0/Internet2 technologies

Federation – Shibboleth

• Internet2 solution for attribute transport across organizations

• Distributed Identity Providers• Uses OpenSAML

myVOCSmy Virtual Organization

Collaboration Suite

Jill Gemmill

John-Paul Robinson

Jason L. W. Lynn

What tools do VOs need?• Mailing List• Other open source tools :

– Wiki/Blog– File sharing (controlled R/W)– Role assignments

• Sharing identity across applications• Easy command line• Self-created applications• And maybe some integration with Grid

computational resources

The larger picture

The environment

A Look Inside myVocs

VO Attribute Authority

AppMailList

YourAppCMSWiki

VO IdP

VO SPVO SP VO SPVO SP

VO Space

Shibboleth SP

myVocs Visual Experience

User Selects

VO Resource

myVocs Visual Experience

User Selects

Identity Provider

myVocs Visual Experience

User Accesses

VO Resource

Bridges + ArchaeoGrid

Biomedical Research Informatics Delivered by Grid Enabled Services

Glasgow Edinburgh

Leicester Oxford

London

Netherlands

Publically Curated Data

Private data

Private data

Private data

Private data

Private data

Private data

CFG Virtual Organisation Ensembl

MGI

HUGO

OMIM

SWISS-PROT

… DATA HUB

RGD

SyntenyGrid

Service

blast

+

VO Authorisation

Information Integrator

http://www.brc.dcs.gla.ac.uk/projects/bridges/

VO’s – Not only HEI

• Final users will be members of a Virtual Organization– education– entertainment– cultural heritage management– cultural tourism

• ArchaeoGRID will offer resources otherwise difficult to access