Anja Le Blanc

The virtual learning space: an interactive 3D environment

This paper describes the Virtual Learning Space (VLS) project, a multi-user, distance learning environment. It describes the historical background which led to the proposal for this project, as well as the educational requirements and the design cycle undertaken. Technical details about the implementation are discussed, including a description of the technologies involved and their interaction with each other, a description of the application, and examples of procedures to create interactivity within the system.Early initial education test studies have been undertaken and ongoing large scale tests are currently being carried out. From this possible future enhancements are presented at the end of the paper.

HELIO: Discovery and analysis of data in heliophysics

Heliophysics is the study of highly energetic events that originate on the sun and propogate through the solar system. Such events can cause critical and possibly fatal disruption of the electromagnetic systems on spacecraft and on ground based structures such as electric power grids, so there is a clear need to understand the events in their totality as they propogate through space and time. This poses a fascinating eScience challenge since the data is gathered by many observatories and communities that have hitherto not needed to work together. We describe how we are developing an eScience infrastructure to make the discovery and analysis of such complex events possible for the communities of heliophysics. The new systematic and data-centric science which will develop from this will be a child of both the space and information ages.

Workflows for Heliophysics

In this paper we describe how we have introduced workflows into the working practices of a community for whom the concept of workflows is very new, namely the heliophysics community. Heliophysics is a branch of astrophysics which studies the Sun and the interactions between the Sun and the planets, by tracking solar events as they travel throughout the Solar system. Heliophysics produces two major challenges for workflow technology. Firstly it is a systems science where research is currently developed by many different communities who need reliable data models and metadata to be able to work together. Thus it has major challenges in the semantics of workflows. Secondly, the problem of time is critical in heliophysics; the workflows must take account of the propagation of events outwards from the sun. They have to address the four dimensional nature of space and time in terms of the indexing of data. We discuss how we have built an environment for Heliophysics workflows building on and extending the Taverna workflow system and utilising the myExperiment site for sharing workflows. We also describe how we have integrated the workflows into the existing practices of the communities involved in Heliophysics by developing a web portal which can hide the technical details from the users, who can concentrate on the data from their scientific point of view rather than on the methods used to integrate and process the data. This work has been developed in the EU Framework 7 project HELIO, and is being disseminated to the worldwide Heliophysics community, since Heliophysics requires integration of effort on a global scale.

HELIO: Discovery and Analysis of Data in Heliophysics

Heliophysics is the study of highly energetic events that originate on the sun and propogate through the solar system. Such events can cause critical and possibly fatal disruption of the electromagnetic systems on spacecraft and on ground based structures such as electric power grids, so there is a clear need to understand the events in their totality as they propogate through space and time. This poses a fascinating eScience challenge since the data is gathered by many observatories and communities that have hitherto not needed to work together. We describe how we are developing an eScience infrastructure to make the discovery and analysis of such complex events possible for the communities of heliophysics. The new systematic and data-centric science which will develop from this will be a child of both the space and information ages.