08 July 2010

Be vewy vewy qwuiet...

Boy, it sure is quiet here in T1 HQ. We're only about five people (and perhaps five of the quieter ones :-). Everybody else is out at IC for the WLCG workshop.

I managed to have a chat with some humanities folks earlier this week about archives and storage, they're in London for Digital Humanities this week. The key point is to make data available: for them it's about making sense of files, interpreting the contents, for the WLCG workshop it is about making the "physical" file available to the job which will analyse it. It is almost as if humanities have solved the transfer problem and HEP the semantic one - although I suspect humanities haven't really "solved" the transfer problem, they just have something which is good enough (many of the humanities datasets I saw are tiny, less than a hundred megs, and they mail CDs to people sometimes.) And HEP haven't really "solved" the semantics problem either, there was a working group looking at curation last year. Interesting to get different perspectives - we can learn from each other. This is another reason why it's good to have shared e-infrastructures.