Experience of e-Social Science: A Case of Andy Turner and MoSeS

Publication concerning a researchers introduction to and uptake of e-Social Science - mine. I am the researcher, and in a way this is all about me, my experience looking back over about three years from a meeting which threw me into the brave new world of Grid Computing and eScience. So, this is all about me and MoSeS and NCeSS and e-Social Science, e-Science, eResearch, life and the universe. It is a reflection on what was done, what worked, what did not work, what was funny and what was sad about MoSeS, a first phase Node of NCeSS (The National Centre for e-Social Science, based in the UK).

MoSeS is/was essentially a project about Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science. It began in earnest in the Summer of 2005 and is due to end/ended in the summer of 2008. This reflection is timely, it is a personal view, not a project view, although I suspect that some aspects would be viewed the same by various project members.

For the last two and a half years, I have been charting in an open way MoSeS, laying down a history detailing information and providing links to people and organisations thats paths cross. As I write this, we are entering the last phase of the project, focussing more and more on documentation that details the specifics of a demographic model, set of applications and portal interface. In addition to this I am finalising a set of web pages, a web site, that details all the development work we have done, the details of project meetings and collaboration efforts.

At a reasonably early stage during MoSeS, I began to appreciate the potential benefits of an information trail that documented our research process. I thought about realising a desire of NCeSS colleagues to look introspectively to try to understand how research is done in practice. I hope that further use of the structured information that I have spent time compiling can be made in this vein.

What I believe now is that in developing structured information that details what I do at work, in an open way, has many benefits, and that these benefits far outweigh the overhead of learning to do and doing it.

Experience of e-Social Science: A Case of Andy Turner and MoSeS

Validation and Metadata