European Healthgrids: A glimpse of the future? - Tony Solomonides

Interesting and useful talk :-

European Healthgrids: A glimpse of the future?
Start: 20/04/2010 - 19:00
End: 20/04/2010 - 21:00
Speaker: Tony Solomonides
City of Bristol College, Bristol

Following a number of grid projects for health and biomedical research, Tony Solomonides led the development of the integrated road map for healthgrid research and deployment in the SHARE project. He has since focussed on two open problems in that field: live knowledge management in a healthgrid and automatic privacy and confidentiality negotiation also in a healthgrid. Having set the scene with an outline of projects and the road map, Tony will report on his and his students' work in healthgrids. - http://www.bristol.bcs.org.uk/?q=node/87.

Empowering engineers and others to create software

With my PhD work, there was extensive prototyping of software solutions created and feedback from engineers. At first engineers tended to ask for software that followed the strategy of the business and met its deadlines. What emerged over time though was a desire from engineers to have more control over the software so that they could do this themselves and have input into this strategy. With a top down strategy and inflexible software and rules about what can be used and installed, missing of deadlines, and problems in meeting aims were built into the system, and engineers realised this.

So even in engineering, an industry that by its nature has to be conservative, due to safety needs, it is realised that empowerment is necessary in software development. So there was a need to empower the engineers by provision of collaborative software that could be installed and used as easily as possible and be adaptable. Empowering the engineers to be fully involved in the creation and maintenance of such software, because they're interested in the software and what it can do, was essential to make the use, re-use and maintenance of the software practical. This is necessary because it would not be possible to achieve application of useful software by any top down strategy, with limited involvement of higher managers and software suppliers. Visualisation and modelling of the software by a large range of people can be achieved by use of diagrams to show the problem and software structure, as part of the software and how it is used.

Further feedback was obtained from others via an online survey of a greater cross section of others rather than only engineers. This bore out that people want more control and involvement in software development and use, and that visual editing of the software over the web is the best way to achieve this.

Unified Computing For Engineering, Business and Science

The research undertaken and described here crosses the boundary between engineering and computing. This is achieved by reusing the same approach for computer modelling and engineering modelling, thus applying computing use case and tree based node and object design. This approach is usable for any kind of tree and network based modelling e.g. engineering process modelling, workflow, business process modelling. The approach makes use of nodes linked by equations, or pure taxonomies if equations aren't required, thus making this useful for taxonomies, and useful for representing computing structures, biology, and engineering structure. When these taxonomies are linked up, they can then be used for a colour coded visualised ontology super taxonomy, of sub taxonomies e.g. processes, materials, components (engineering or computer software), resources, and cost rates.

The visualisation represents the structure of the model, and the structure of the problem, creating a unified approach for systematic program and model, computing and engineering, business, and biology structure representation. This makes structured representation much clearer than it can be in a flat structure such as a spreadsheet, and makes auditing and keeping track of changes easier.

This unified approach then enables representation of the problem at a high level of abstraction and if the optional equations are included aids process modelling and decision support. This high level of abstraction and structured representation and visualisation makes errors more obvious and findable, aiding auditing. Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0 technologies make this approach feasible for moving this approach from more complex to simple low end computing and networking the approach where useful or necessary.