TheeMinerals collaboratory: tools and experience

Abstract

Collaboratories provide an environment where researchers at distant locations work together at tackling important scientific and industrial problems. In this paper we outline the tools and principles used to form the eMinerals collaboratory, and discuss the experience, from within, of working towards establishing the eMinerals project team as a functioning virtual organisation. Much of the emphasis of this paper is on experience with the IT tools. We introduce a new application sharing tool.

Exploring the Enterprise Value of Wikis through Media Choice Theories

“…Low Wikis are largely a many -to-many communication medium where messages are directed to groups and not the individual. (Black & Kilzer, 2008;Bean & Hott, 2005;Daft & Lengel, 1986;Dove et al, 2005;Leuf & Cunningham, 2001;Majchrzak et al, 2006;Wiki, 2008;Wikipatterns, 2008) Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.…”

Grid computing and molecular simulations: the vision of theeMinerals project

“…Ideally such tools should not have significant overheads for the user, and should require no more effort than that is required to knock on the door of the person in the next office along the corridor. The vision is to be able to reproduce the experience of geographical proximity for distributed collaborating scientists [9,10]. This goes hand in hand with the tools for sharing resources and data.…”

“…This concept arose as an independent idea, in fact without a necessary dependence on IT, but it is a particularly pertinent idea for escience where organisations come together to share computing resources [9,10]. In fact, collaborative working is increasingly becoming more of the norm in terms of funding.…”

“…Furthermore, the access to data needs to support easy data sharing, and it is essential for data to be stored in a format that can be shared between different applications. This paper serves as an introduction to a collection of papers [10 -20] written by members of the eMinerals project [21], which represent an attempt to develop an integrated compute and data grid infrastructure [19,20,22 -25] together with support to enable the project team to work as a VO [9,10]. The rest of this paper gives a broad outline of the vision that drives the project.…”

New tools to support collaboration and virtual organizations

“…It is important to note that the tools to support a geographically dispersed VO should also operate at a local level, adding new value in supporting work between members and leaders of a research team. The eMinerals and NIEeS projects have had a long-standing interest in exploiting and evaluating tools to support the workings of VOs (Dove et al 2004(Dove et al , 2005. Recently, we have seen the emergence of a new class of tools that, in modern parlance, are associated with what is called 'Web 2.0'; in this brief review, we report on the work we have been doing in this area.…”