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Uptake of e-Research in Taiwan and the UK
Summary
| Project Start: | 1st May 2007 |
| Project End: | 30th April 2008 - extended to 31st July 2008 |
| Project Partners: | National Centre for e-Social Science ( Dr Alex Voss ) and Academia Sinica Grid Centre (Dr Simon C. Lin) |
| Funding Programme: | British Academy and National Science Council of Taiwan Special Joint Project Programme |
Background
The National Centre for e-Social Science and Academia Sinica Grid Centre are collaborating to conduct a comparative study of the uptake of e-Research in Taiwan and the United Kingdom. The project is funded by the British Academy and the National Science Council of Taiwan .
The use of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the social sciences promises to open up new avenues for the investigation of phenomena within societies and at a global scale. The concept of e-Social Science stands for the development of methods and tools that exploit this potential, working closely with initiatives in other research areas and building on their achievements. The UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has invested in the development of a dedicated e-Social Science programme and has made e-Social Science a core strand in its strategy. The ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) represents a dedicated investment that is unique in its coordinated approach and that is firmly established in the wider e-Research community.
The aim of this project, funded by the British Academy and the National Science Council of Taiwan, was to study the potential and uptake of e-Social Science in Taiwan and to draw comparisons with the UK’s experience. The purpose of such a comparison is to identify ways in which e-Social Science activities can be fostered and in which a programme of coordinated activities might be established. Because of the limited resources and time available, we necessarily had to focus on a small number of specific areas that could be investigated. We chose to study:
- repositories and data archives as a fundamental resource in social scientific research,
- social simulation as a generic method of investigation that is applicable to many application areas considering larger social structures at urban, regional, national and global scales and
- the study of the socio-economic impact of natural disasters as a concrete application area of particular interest.
In order to achieve this, the project has facilitated a number of events and exchanges to bring together researchers in these fields and facilitate exchange. We have used opportunities for discussions at international conferences but also organised two week-long exchange visits. The project’s activities have also lead to the involvement of NCeSS and Academia Sinica Grid Computing in the EUAsiaGrid project, which aims to foster the uptake of e-Research in the AsiaPacific region (www.euasiagrid.eu). As part of this project, we are continuing our work on e-Social Science as one of five strands in the workpackage on support for scientific applications.
Repositories and Data Archives
Repositories and data archives play an important role in the social sciences as researchers often draw on existing data to complement their own empirical material. Data archives are usually institutions with a remit to provide services to research communities at a national level. In the UK, organisations such as the UK Data Archive, Mimas and Edina are providing access to social science datasets. In Taiwan, the Academia Sinica Center for Survey Research provides similar services.
We have facilitated meetings between representatives of these organisations and discussed issues such as the availability of government data (especially census data) for academic research and the need for secure data services to facilitate their usage while guaranteeing that personal data are not disclosed. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) runs a Virtual Microdata Laboratory that allows approved researchers access to confidential datasets in a number of locations throughout the country. Similarly, the Academia Sinica Center for Survey Research provides a secure setting for the use of confidential datasets. The fact that these secure environments are limited to a small number of physically secure settings and that they do not provide access to advanced ICT resources limits their usefulness and we have identified a common interest to investigate ways of overcoming these limitations.
We hope to follow up this discussion at a workshop on secure data services in Taipei in April 2009. The recent move by the ESRC to fund a Secure Data Service in the UK that would increase the availability of datasets for academic researchers will be of particular interest in this context.
Social Simulation
Work conducted at the MoSeS node of NCeSS on social simulation methods is of interest to researchers in Taiwan as it can be applied to address a range of social scientific questions as well as to aid policy making in areas such as healthcare and urban planning. We have facilitated early exchanges between researchers on this matter and are pursuing this interest further in the context of the EUAsiaGrid project. Our aim is to make software developed by MoSeS available on the EGEE grid infrastructure, so that researchers in Taiwan can use them to construct social simulation applications based on Taiwanese datasets and running on Taiwanese compute resources (such as those provided by Academia Sinica Grid Computing through the EUAsiaGrid virtual organisation).
We have explored the use of datasets held by the Academia Sinica Center for Survey Research in discussions with Dr Ly-Yun Chang, the executive director of the center, linking our work on data archives with the topic of tools and methodologies. By April 2009 we hope to have the necessary codes for the preparation of datasets ported to EGEE and to have identified suitable datasets that can be used in social simulation applications.
Disaster Mitigation
The mitigation of the impacts of natural disasters is an application area that is of particular relevance to our Taiwanese partners. Typhoons account for 72% of the socio-economic damage caused by natural disasters as Taiwan is hit by 3.6 typhoons per year on average. We have discussed this application area with colleagues from the Taiwan National University and the National Science and Technology Center of Disaster Reduction, who are working on a National Spatial Data Infrastructure in Taiwan.
Disaster mitigation is an inherently multidisciplinary endeavour and one that brings together various kinds of datasets such as satellite images, GIS information and sensor data as well as socio-economic datasets. The aim is to inform the development of prediction models and policy making to minimise the potential for damage as well as to provide input to early warning and decision support systems used to manage natural disaster situations. The complex data integration and analysis problems involved in disaster mitigation work call for the development of sophisticated information systems that can potentially benefit from the application of e-Research technologies.
Because of the importance of this application area for Taiwan and the wider AsiaPacific region, we have made it one of the application areas that the EUAsiaGrid project will help to develop. Our initial discussions are now being taken forward in a wider context in collaboration with colleagues from Thailand and other countries. We will seek to explore the potential application of social simulation techniques to predict the socio-economic impact of natural disasters under a range of different scenarios.
Outcomes
The project has enabled us to identify and begin to explore three related areas within the framework of e Social Science. We are now developing this work further in the context of follow-on projects such as EUAsiaGrid. Our aims in this project are to widen the uptake of e-Social Science approaches, to lay the foundations for international collaboration and to convince national and trans-national funding organisations to invest in this area. Through involvement in the Humanities and Social Sciences Community Group within the Open Grid Forum, we hope to develop a stable and open platform for these activities and to align them with wider developments in the e-Research community.