Scientists face many severe challenges in extracting value from the increasingly large volumes of data they generate. In this paper we describe the requirements we have derived from working across a wide range of e-science projects. In particular, the CARMEN neuroinformatics project has exposed a range of challenges due to a need to analyse and share large volumes of data. We have identified th...

e-Science helps scientists to automate scientific discovery processes and experiments, and promote collaboration across organizational boundaries and disciplines. These experiments involve data discovery, knowledge discovery, integration, linking, and analysis through different software tools and activities. Scientific workflow is one technique through which such activities and processes can be...

This paper describes the design of a cloud computing platform e-Science Central (eSC) which provides both Software and Platform as a Service for scientific data management, analysis and collaboration. e-SC can be deployed on both private (e.g. Eucalyptus) and public Clouds (Amazon AWS and Microsoft Windows Azure). The SaaS application allows scientists to upload data, edit and run workflows, an...

Computational simulations and thus scientific computing is the third pillar alongside theory and experiment in todays science. The term e-science evolved as a new research field that focuses on collaboration in key areas of science using next generation computing infrastructures (i.e. co-called e-science infrastructures) to extend the potential of scientific computing. During the past years, si...

Over the last decade or so, there has been much discussion of and progress in computational science. There was the HPCC (High Performance Computing and Communications) Initiative and the NSF Grand Challenge programs which largely focused on this. However recently there has been a subtle change – for example NSF initiated the ITR (Information Technology Research) program based on the recommendat...

In the emerging Web of Data, publishing stable and unique identifiers promises great potential in using the web as common platform to discover and enrich data in the ecologic sciences. With our collaborative e-Science platform “BEFdata”, we generated and published unique identifiers for the data repository of the Biodiversity – Ecosystem Functioning Research Unit of the German Research Foundati...

Collaboration for e-science, namely executing experiments in a cooperative way by sharing data, tools, and expertise towards a common scientific goal, is becoming more and more appealing in a context like the scientific community. In such a context, a critical mass is needed to address very important and complex new questions arising because of the increasing availability of experimental data m...

Semantics, ontologies and eScience are key areas of research that aim to deal with the growing volume, number of sources and heterogeneity of geoscience data, information and knowledge. Following a workshop held at the eScience Institute in Edinburgh on the 7–9th of March 2008, this paper discusses some of the significant research topics and challenges for enhancing geospatial computing using s...