Peter Dew

My current research interests concern Web-based systems with applications in the domains of e-Science, e-Business and e-Law. I am also contributing to the emergence of Web Science, a new discipline to increase understanding of the Web and hence enable the development of next generation Web systems. Much of my research is undertaken in multi-disciplinary research teams. I am interested in the application of semantic meta-data architectures and semantic provenance within Grid-based virtual organizations. In particular I’m concerned with Quality of Service issues such as scalable & interactive performance, secure role-based access and control. The focus is on integrating various existing standards and technologies such as semantic provenance, Web2.0, Grid & Web computing and P2P.

My multi-disciplinary research includes:

• e-Science : I am working with scientific communities (e.g. chemical kinematics) where the application of ICT technologies has the potential to radically change the way a scientific community works. A new Semantically-enable Model-Experiment Evaluation Process (SeMEEP) to support the scientific method is being researched.
• E-Business : This research builds on two very successful projects: the EPSRC funded DAME (Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment) project and its follow-on BROADEN (Business Resource Optimisation for Aftermarket and Design on Engineering Networks) involving Rolls-Royce and Electronic Data Systems (EDS). At Leeds the outcomes included a novel computational resource broker which has been successfully deployed in Rolls-Royce. Further research is needed to improve its performance and predictability so that it can be commercially exploited.
• e-Law: This new venture extends my research into the e-Law domain with colleagues from the Leeds University Business School and a practicing barrister.One case study concerns product certification in which a traditional physical legal bundle is replaced by a semantically enabled on-line legal bundle which can then be shared with others members of the legal team where ever they are located.

I have been the lead academic for two successful University Companies where I was a non-executive director. In 2003 I was the lead academic to establish a new University Company ICONA Solutions Ltd. This exploited research from an EPSRC/DTI Visualisation of the Impact of Tolerance Allocation in Automotive Design (VITAL) research project. ICONA has been successfully trading since then and has sold licenses to over 20 leading auto-mobile companies.