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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:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/get-involved/research-data-spring">http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/get-involved/research-data-spring</a><br>
<br>
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! <br>
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.<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
Of course other ideas are also to be encouraged...<br>
<br>
cheers<br>
james<br>
<br>
<br>
Proposal Idea:<br>
<br>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm" align="LEFT"><font
face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt"
size="3">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...</font></font></p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm" align="LEFT"><br>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm" align="LEFT"><font
face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt"
size="3">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.</font></font></p>
<br>
<br>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm" align="LEFT"><font
face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt"
size="3">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. </font></font>
</p>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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"
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