Infrastructures for Social Simulation Rob Procter National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation ISGC 2010 Social Simulation Tutorial

Rationale for NeISS  Growing demand for social simulation models  Build capacity in social simulation  Encourage multi-disciplinary research  Leverage existing UK investments in computation and data resources

Health and Social Care

Infrastructures for Social Simulation  We need infrastructure to make most effective use of powerful, new research tools  must provide more than simulation software and computational resources  Infrastructures for social simulation should  provide secure access to diverse datasets  support the simulation research lifecycle from problem formulation to publishing of results  enable collaboration through sharing of simulation resources, including models and results

ESNW The Research Lifecycle Share results and conclusions and discuss with collaborators Explore datasets and determine suitability Analyse results and compare with hypothesis Review literature and generate hypothesis Write papers Build models and execute them Publish papers Find datasets related to proposed area of work

NeISS Architecture Overview

NeISS Architecture  Simulation service layer comprising fundamental components  Composition layer in which individual services composed into workflows  Architecture layer provides tools and methods needed to access simulation services and workflows, and combines them into domain-specific exemplars  Deployment layer provides user access to tools and exemplars

NeISS Architecture

Simulation Service Layer  Data  Embedding tools for documentation, standardisation, enhancement and management of data  Models  Dynamic microsimulation, behavioural modelling and activity analysis  Visualisation  MapTube, SecondLife

Visualisation

Composition Layer  Enactment  enactment, management, monitoring and creation of workflows  Publishing  Social curation and sharing of research resources  myExperiment

Workflows  A workflow is a means to compose and orchestrate services so that they co-operate to implement desired behaviour of a system

scientists Local Web Repositories Graduate Students Undergraduate Students Virtual Learning Environment Technical Reports Reprints Peer- Reviewed Journal & Conference Papers Preprints & Metadata Certified Experimental Results & Analyses experimentation Data, Metadata, Provenance, Scripts, Workflows, Services, Ontologies, Blogs,... Digital Libraries Publishing: Science 2.0 Next Generation Researchers

Architecture Layer  Portal  plug-and-play services  Frameworks and standards  Service Oriented Architecture  Secure access to distributed resources  single sign-on  Core data and computation services  Data repositories, grids, clouds, …

NeISS Portal

Deployment Layer  User engagement  naive, sophisticated, power  researchers  policy users city and regional (land use) planning health and social services transport

Thanks to Mark Birkin, Andy Turner, Carole Goble, Dave De Roure and everyone else in the NeISS project team