BlogMyData: a Virtual Research Environment for collaborative visualization of environmental data

Understanding and predicting the Earth system requires the collaborative effort of scientists from many different disciplines and institutions. The National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science Climate Group (NCAS-Climate) are both high-profile interdisciplinary research centres involving numerous universities and institutes around the UK and many international collaborators. Both groups make use of the latest numerical models of the climate and earth system, validated by observations, to simulate the environment and its response to forcings such as an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Their scientists must work together closely to understand the various aspects of these models and assess their strengths and weaknesses.At the present time, collaborations take place chiefly through face-to-face meetings, the scholarly literature and informal electronic exchanges of emails and documents. All of these methods suffer from serious deficiencies that hamper effective collaboration. For practical reasons, face-to-face meetings can be held only infrequently. The scholarly literature does not yet adequately link scientific results to the source data and thought processes that yielded them, and additionally suffers from a very slow turnaround time. Informal exchanges of electronic information commonly lose vital context; for example, scientists typically exchange static visualizations of data (as GIFs or PostScript plots for example), but the recipient cannot easily access the data behind the visualization, or customize the visualization in any way. Emails are rarely published or preserved adequately for future use. The recent adoption of “off the shelf” Wikis and basic blogs has addressed some of these issues, but does not usually address specific scientific needs or enable the interactive visualization of data