Hi James,
This sounds like a great idea. It is also something that has been proven
possible.
A program very similar to what you are describing has been set up in
Australia, called the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network
(AURIN). http://aurin.org.au/
AURIN have built their workbench software upon open source, and are
moving toward open sourcing their tools as well.
The challenge which is grant worthy would be to take the AURIN framework
which is based on Australian datasets and customise to be able to work
as effectively with UK datasets.
I'm CCing Chris, Jack, and Stewart who are directly involved in the
AURIN program, and may have extra suggestions.
On 17/12/2014 11:13 pm, James Reid wrote:
All, in the UK one of the educational funding charities is having an
open door ideas pitch where you can pitch ideas relating to research data:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/get-involved/research-data-spring
I'm on the cusp of submitting an idea to this but thought Id poll this
list first to see if there's any support/ interest i.e. to validate
the notion and make sure its not just my creeping insanity knocking!
As the submitted ideas will be ranked based on votes cast I was also
trying to gauge if there would be any support for what I'm proposing.
Below is the nub of the idea. If folks think this is something that
has merit (and moreover something they might vote for) then could you
ping me a '+1' off list?
Of course other ideas are also to be encouraged...
cheers
james
Proposal Idea:
The concept of Cloud Work Bench (CWB) is quite simple -- to provide
researchers in the geospatial domain (GI Scientists,geomaticians, GIS
experts, spatial disciplines) the tools, storage and data persistence
they require to conduct research without the need to manage the same
in a local context that can be fraught with socio-technical barriers
that impede the actual research. By streamlining the availability and
deployment of open source software tools, by supporting auto-generated
web services and using open data, the work bench concept is geared
towards removing the barriers that are inherent in geospatial research
workflows -- how to deploy the tools you want and have the storage and
data management capabilities without the overhead of doing it all
yourself. Think of it as an academic Dropbox with additional
geospatial software tools and data thrown in...
Recognising the high set-up cost for researchers in acquiring and
managing both the tools and the data with which to undertake research,
CWB will on demand, instantiate virtual machines that can be
configured at initiation by the researcher and will pre-populate their
custom 'workbench' with a selection of open source tooling and open
data with the additional assurance of resilience and persistence
provided by a University backed private cloud.
We propose piloting the CWB approach within the geospatial research
community which has a well established and broad user base across
academia and industry and also has a mature open source toolset and
data stack which are prerequisites to conducting research e.g. Open
Street Map, Ordnance Survey Open data, Postgis, Geoserver, GDAL/OGR.
--
James S Reid
Geoservices,
EDINA,University of Edinburgh
t:+44 (0)131 651 1383
m:0759 5116988
"The things that pass for knowledge
I can't understand"
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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Cameron Shorter,
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