Another introduction

Yet another introduction:

 >At 12:08 PM 12/5/2005, Taylor, Ronald C wrote:
 >...
 > And I've had some discussions here at PNNL
 > with Dr. Jim Myers on how we can use the Semantic Web and Semantic Grid
 > concepts for the terabytes of biological data we will be generating. Jim
 >recently left us to join NCSA in Urbana as associate director for
 >integrated cyberservices. He'd be interested in this. (Hey Jim, are you
 > already listening?)

Over the last decade or so I've been working on collaboratories and 
grids and, most recently, data and metadata integration. As Ron 
Taylor said a while back, I've moved recently to the National Center 
for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. I'm 
directing our Cyberenvironments effort and looking broadly at the use 
of semantic web/semantic grid technologies across a number of domains 
including biology and biomedicine. I attended to initial SW for the 
Life Sciences workshop, am part of the Semantic Grid Research Group 
in Global Grid Forum, etc.

At NCSA I'm trying to grow our efforts to build semantic services for 
the grid, primarily data provenance, content/process management, data 
integration in the context of community-scale science portals 
(cyberenvironments) at this point, though we have visual analytics 
and social networking groups that are starting to think about 
semantic web/grid technologies as well.

At PNNL (with a number of collaborators), we developed of tools to 
manage data provenance and annotation, expose those capabilities to 
users in a portal (Cmcs.org), and to look at issues of automatically 
extracting metadata from binary/ascii files. That work continues and 
I'm trying to expand it here and connect it with the broad program of 
work on middleware and development of cyberenvironments for various 
science communities at NCSA (and we have positions open in this area 
at www.ncsa.uiuc.edu... :-) )

While I think SW capabilities are widely useful, e.g. in terms of 
helping researchers to define their models clearly, I think it is 
absolutely critical for systems-science and for scaling and evolving 
cyberinfrastructure. I don't see any other way to keep the coupling 
between scientific models and software and between different software 
tools low enough to make it all go. Preaching to the choir a bit here 
- I guess you could say I have an interest in making sure the value 
proposition of using semantic web/grid technologies gets heard and 
want to drive towards clear impacts on science and engineering research.

Cheers,
   Jim


James D. Myers
Acting Associate Director, Cyberenvironments and Technologies,
NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
1205 W. Clark St, MC-257
Urbana, IL 61801
217-244-1934
jimmyers@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Received on Saturday, 14 January 2006 03:47:58 UTC