Earlier this year Andy Buckley from the University of Glasgow approached UKRN to share the work of the OpenMAPP project – Open Meta-Analysis in Particle Physics. Andy presented a webinar on data reinterpretation in High Energy Physics (HEP) which is now available on our YouTube channel. The webinar slides are here.
High Energy Physics involves both real data and synthetic data. Theoretical models use simulated, synthetic data to test theories which are then compared to the real data obtained in experiments. These techniques have wider applications in other disciplines that handle large data sets, for example epidemiology and climate modelling.
Within the Physics community there is increasing focus on sustainability and reproducibility. Data, analysis, predictions and simulations are computationally expensive to host and analyse. It’s important to make the best use of resources created through public investment and the CO2 the work generates. Reinterpreting existing data, both real and simulated, together with the analysis used, requires infrastructure, coordination and technical standards. OPenMAPP is an EU project funded by CHIST-ERA that links tools and data for reinterpretation. The team are developing systems for publishing metadata and linking together data and logic for reinterpretation, across a family of repositories, and developing code interfaces to plan, run and combine the outputs from those different tools into single holistic views. Again, these challenges are not unique to Physics.
UKRN would like to work with OpenMAPP to provide a forum to explore similarities with other fields particularly in software development, to identify shared challenges and ways of exchanging ideas and best practice. If you’re interested in data reinterpretation in your own discipline please get in touch so we can start these conversations.