Re: flagship use cases proposal

Hi James and All,

It seems that we have agreement on a use case e.g. a scientist uses 
linked data, processes it with a scientific workflow + some manual and 
qualitative analysis makes it available.

The question seems which domain: eGovernment Public Policy or 
bioinformatics. There are benefits to both.

* eGovernment has the whole push with Data.gov.uk and open government 
data, which has been really a hit with the community as a whole. 
Non-scientists can also usually understand policy type use cases.

* for bioinformatics it would cement our ties with the HCLS working 
group. I know there are strong demands for provenance and several 
iniatives their trying to capture provenance type information. Also 
workflows and linked data have fairly strong user communities in the domain.

I think the best way to solve this is who takes initiative :-)

So is there anyone who would like to write up this use case (use case #2)?

Thanks!
Paul


James Cheney wrote:
> On Feb 18, 2010, at 8:26 PM, Yolanda Gil wrote:
>
>> Hi Paul:
>>
>> Your proposal is very reasonable, thanks as always for pushing the 
>> requirements document forward and doing this synthesis.
>>
>> I wonder what others think, but one thing I'd suggest to keep in mind 
>> is who our main immediate consumers are going to be.  Right now my 
>> sense is that it is going to be the Linked Data community, and if I 
>> am right it is a pity that there is no use case centered around that 
>> topic.  If you want to keep the number to 3, I would say that if I 
>> had to take one of your proposed 3 out it would be #2 (public 
>> policy), as that area is kind of behind in the times for social 
>> reasons.  Just my 2c though, what do others think? 
>
> Hi Yolanda,
>
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "behind the times".  It is 
> true that the use case is written more from the perspective of the 
> traditional pen-and-paper approach to research but the social 
> scientists involved in this kind of work are very interested in moving 
> parts of it online and available in ways that provide greater value to 
> funders and society.  This kind of data would, I think, be a big part 
> of the eGovernment visions discussed last week.
>
> I view linked data (or curated databases, which seem like the same 
> thing to me) as very relevant to the evidence/public policy use case 
> since online, shared and linked data is likely the future of data 
> management for these areas (as they are already central in 
> bioinformatics).
>
> Likewise, social science research tends to involve a mix of 
> qualitative, manual steps and quantitative, computational steps.  So, 
> to address Luc's concern, the scenario I described could also 
> highlight provenance in scientific workflows, as well as the issue of 
> integrating linked/curated data provenance and workflow provenance.
>
> So it would make more sense to me to broaden the evidence use case to 
> clarify its relevance to linked data and scientific workflow settings, 
> rather than simply replace it.
>
> Of course, since I wrote the use case, naturally I'm partial to it :)
>
> --James

Received on Friday, 19 February 2010 17:25:15 UTC