The Bridging from Concepts to Data and Computation for eScience (BC2DC’19) Workshop will be held in conjunction with eScience’19 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 in San Diego, CA.
Research addressing global challenges federates a growing diversity of disciplines, requires sustained contributions from many autonomous organizations and builds on heterogeneous evolving computational platforms. Scientific knowledge is scattered across cloud-based services, local storage, and in source code targeting specific architectures and computational contexts. Concepts reflected in disparate sources are hardly computer-communicable and computer-actionable across or even within disciplines. This makes traceability, communication of methods, provenance gathering and reusing data and methods harder and more time-consuming. Agile response to new needs and opportunities may be accelerated when the available methods and required components have mutually comprehensible descriptions. Commercial clouds play an increasingly important role in large-scale scientific experimentation. Examples of diversity in technology and jurisdiction, as well as in the large-scale exploitation of clouds can be found on both sides of the Atlantic: in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as well as in the ongoing massive migration of data and other resources onto Amazon’s AWS by NASA.
It follows that while potential for large-scale data-driven experimentation increases, so does complexity as well as the risk of getting locked into vendor-specific solutions. To deal with these challenges and to help researchers make better and transparent use of diverse infrastructures many systems propose higher-level abstraction to hide and orchestrate infrastructural and implementation details. Domain experts need to directly control sophisticated and dynamic concepts pertaining to data, execution contexts and diverse e-infrastructures. Furthermore, they need mechanisms that allow them to take responsibility for the quality of results, without distracting technological artefacts.
These often take the form of service-based platforms, containerised solutions, APIs, ontological descriptions of underlying resources, provenance repositories, etc. This workshop focuses on platform-driven and domain-specific developments that contribute towards unifying underlying platforms, clouds, data, computational resources and concepts in order to empower research developers to deliver, maintain and communicate larger, increasingly complex eScience systems.
In particular we welcome contributions in the following areas, not excluding other topics of interest: