NeuroHub: the information environment for Neuroscientists

This project will develop a set of tools and a framework that will allow neuroscientists to efficiently and effectively use existing e-Infrastructure and by doing so will enable a more productive research cycle, streamlining the laboratory experience from conception of experiment to publication of the research results. 

 The framework and tools will be the product of in depth user requirements analysis, adaptation of existing software, development of key missing components and a tight collaboration between neuroscientists, technologists and resource providers at three HEIs. 

The collaboration leverages the e-Research South consortium and builds on a strategic regional activity that will provide sustainability beyond the lifetime of the project. The research outputs will include open source software as well as best practice guides and training material.

Project Description

This project will support the entire research lifecycle from investigation of prior knowledge through experimentation, computation, analysis and dissemination of results. Through the application of an existing web 2.0 framework researchers will have the capability to build individual applications using existing services from JISC, research council projects, from existing service providers and from new services identified through the user requirements phase. This is illustrated as a set of key services that may be constructed together.

We will build a set of user-composable tools with which researchers will construct their own research information environment, tailored to their own needs presented through a web 2.0 access layer or a locally hostable application where necessary. This will give flexibility to use both open and closed source applications so that researchers are able to concentrate on the most important thing, their research rather than the toolset.

Key concepts will include the instantiation of services through interconnection of software and services at several levels from, infrastructure as a service (e.g. Amazon, Eucalyptus WS) allowing utilisation of virtualised platforms, including their instantiation on demand across multiple providers, Platform as a Service (as is currently offered by the UK NGS and EGEE projects), starting and stopping remote jobs using common open standard interfaces such as offered through the HPC Basic Profile and software as a service for the very much higher level functionality that is starting to be approached through some commercial software vendors. This will allow us to connect services using licensed software in manners which are allowable to license holders but still easily manipulated and built into the access layer. This will be able to be run within a number of different environments to ensure that there is no ‘vendor lock-in’.

A significant part of this project will be the integration of existing tools that researchers are happy with, and make extensive use of, into the framework. This will be achieved through the use of standard interfaces where possible and specific translators where not. The interfaces will allow access to a range of common scientific tools, both open source and commercial, in conjunction with outputs from existing JISC, EPSRC and DTI e-Science funded projects at the Universities involved including:

• Comb-e-Chem: Laboratory information management and archiving (EPSRC)
• GridBS: standards based computational task submission (OMII)
• BVREH: Image annotation tools within a whole environment for the humanities (AHRC/JISC)
• ClimatePrediction.NET: volunteer computing framework utilization and information publishing and dissemination for public interest science. (EPSRC/NERC/Microsoft)
• BID: Combining research data and institutional repository storage (JISC)
• SARoNGS/ShibGrid: providing authentication services for national resources (JISC)
• myExperiment: web 2.0 presentation and community building system connecting researchers to enable workflow re-use etc. (JISC/Microsoft)
• OptIPuter Microscopy Demonstrator: Real-time intercontinental experimental equipment sharing and communication using high performance networks. (Microsoft)
• Godiva2 portal project and ncWMS: Open Geospatial Consortium standardized web services for climate model, satellite and in situ data, enabling easy exchange and comparison of Geospatial datasets. (NERC)
• HERMES: Desktop data manipulation between SRB, GridFTP and local filesystems.
  
• ADVISE: Web fronted visualisation tool developed during DTI project, collaboration between NAG, Leeds and NVM. (TSB)
• Integrative Biology and IBVRE: development of tools and infrastructure for integrative biology (EPSRC, JISC)
• Tycho: a RESTful system that includes sychronous/asynchronous communication, and virtual registry (P2P)

Each of these have developed tools and techniques that are of use to the researcher but may be a separate application that a researcher may have to install (and may not be available on the platform that they are using) or within a portal environment that is making them use a large and complex tool for only one single type of functionality. NeuroHub will present these as an easy to use and composable set of services that will allow researchers to connect into existing infrastructures.