Data Management through e-Social Science (DAMES): was funded in 2008 for 3-years by the ESRC. DAMES developed a specialist research environment for social science research. The social sciences are not unlike the clinical sciences in the volume and heterogeneity of distributed data sets that are being created. DAMES focused in particular on education, occupational, minority/ethnicity and on e-Health data sets. Particular studies included research into in the area of depression, self-harm and suicide. The data sets associated with this research covered the clinical sciences (hospital admission data; mental health data sets; primary care GP data sets); social science data sets including the UK Census and a variety of individual level microdata sets from providers such as the Office of National Statistics; and geospatial data sets from commercial providers such as the Ordnance Survey. The DAMES systems were validated and required ethics permission to support a wide range of clinical data linkage scenarios has been obtained. An example paper from DAMES is available here.

Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment (GEODE): was funded by ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) and began in October 2005. The intention of GEODE was to develop an e-Infrastructure to facilitate the processing of occupational data from social survey and related outputs. This include the generation and provision of automated data confrontation and management programs which allow lay users to understand and link their ‘raw’ data with a variety of sociological occupational classification schemes; the development of a virtual network acting as an international ‘depository’ of occupational information; and the exploration of operations which may facilitate the further computation of occupationally based social classification schemes for new versions of international occupational data. The GEODE project benefits this proposal in numerous ways including experiences in developing e-Infrastructures for a non-IT savvy research community; dealing with federated data access; user interface design including portal technologies, and support for development and roll out of e-Security solutions. An example paper from GEODE is available here.