What is eResearch?
Listen to the talk on eResearch given by Peter Halfpenny on 28 January 2010 or view the slides in PDF format.
eResearch is research enabled by the application of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs). Ten years ago the emphasis was on the Grid, that is, the hardware, software and standards necessary to co-ordinate geographically distributed compute and data resources and deliver them over the internet to researchers regardless of location. The ambition was to facilitate bigger and faster science, with collaborators world-wide addressing key challenges in new ways. This model was particularly appropriate to particle physics, and such challenges as weather predictions and earthquake modelling. However, the approach is less matched to other disciplines, including the social sciences where mixtures of numerous quantitative and qualitative methods are used to pursue relatively small scale issues, with few generic problems requiring complex software to coordinate huge distributed compute and data resources. Accordingly, e-social science – eResearch within the social sciences – has broadened out to draw on numerous ICTs that support the everyday work of researchers, including those loosely collected together under the title of Web 2.0. Although less technically powerful than the Grid, their relative accessibility and simplicity – both in terms of implementation effort and ease of use – has made them attractive to users who do not need more sophisticated ICTs and who are deterred from using Grid services by their complexity.