DOE2000 Collaboratory Research:
Collaboratory Session Management
Collaborative integration of research and development activities
promises to provide significant new capabilities for remote
science facility use
and collaborative problem solving.
To achieve effective collaboration, this project
proposes to
develop collaborative management tools for scheduling and monitoring resources.
The new technology, which builds on existing efforts in
internetworking and
high-end visualization systems,
will be demonstrated on challenging DOE scientific applications.
Background
DOE has a wide range of intellectual, experimental, and
computational resources distributed nationwide.
Current collaborative tools and technology are not well integrated,
standards and security mechanisms are limited, and
display technologies are incompatible,
creating interoperability problems that hamper
complex problem solving.
To make existing resources truly effective,
scientists and engineers must be able to
interact as if they were physically collocated--sharing
data, high-performance computing systems, and instrumentation independent of
location.
Through a combination of high-speed networks,
advanced virtual reality technologies, and
integrated collaborative management tools, we can create
a first-quality interactive collaboratory environment.
Approach
We will develop a real-time collaboration framework to integrate existing,
but incompatible collaboration tools.
This framework will entail development of
To ensure compatibility of user interfaces, we
will create a consortium
of real-time collaboration management designers, including
those in non-DOE projects and
industry,
to create standard interface specifications.
We also plan to hold biannual workshops
to ensure the widespread use of the integrated model.
Collaborators
The work on
collaboration management involves
researchers from
Argone National Laboratory and from
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.