AIAI Presentation

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Building Collaborative eResearch
Environments Virtual Organisations
andCollaborative Environments
Stephen Potter University of Edinburgh stephenp_at_in
f.ed.ac.uk
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Outline

• The Collaborative Grid
• Tools for collaboration

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Contemporary Grid Computing

• Roots in high performance computing and
  specialised scientific problem-solving.
• Grid computing is now emerging as a more powerful
  general purpose infrastructure to enable new
  research.
• Its contemporary definition is
• coordinated resource sharing and problem solving
  in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual
  organizations

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Virtual Organisations

• People coming together across geographical
  boundaries.
• Significantly, also across disciplinary
  boundaries.
• Dynamic formation according to problem.
• Computer support for discovering people and
  mediating interaction.
• Also bringing together data and computational
  resources.
• We can distinguish three key aspects of a Grid
  Compute, Data and Collaboration.

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Access Grid

• Room based videoconferencing with large format
  display
• supports group-to-group interactions across the
  Grid.
• supports interaction and visualisation.
• nodes in 150 institutions worldwide.
• routine use in UK e-Science programme.
• Also available as single machine solution
  Personal Interface to the Grid (PIG).
• Can also use Virtual Rooms VideoConferencing
  System (VRVS).
• In fact collaboration can use any video- and
  teleconferencing facilities.

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Access Grid node
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Austin Tate
Simon Buckingham Shum Marc Eisenstadt
David DeRoure Nigel Shadbolt
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CoAKTinG Background

• The CoAKTinG Project aims to support and enhance
  e-Science collaborations.
• Exploiting technologies, tools and methodologies
  where already available
• and augment these with novel ones where
  necessary.
• 2 year project - started June 2002
• Funded by UK e-Science Programme.
• Involves a total of 15 PIs, Researchers,
  Students.

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to Support and Enhance e-Science Collaborations
awareness ofcolleagues presence
virtual meetings
mapping real time discussions/group sensemaking
recovering information from meetings
enacting decisions/coordinating activities
synthesising artifacts

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BuddySpace
awareness ofcolleagues presence

• Presence an aggregated view of an entitys
  dynamically changing attributes
• Availability (Im logged on for a
  videoconference)
• Preference (Only my boss can interrupt me now)
• Capability (My current device can accept video
  calls)
• Location (Im in Munichurgent calls only)
• BuddySpace - enriched instant messaging client
• Awareness of peopleand other resources.
• Editable maps for better visualisation of
  presence.
• Advanced group chat facilities with voting,
  attention meters
• Provides lightweight communications channel
  (based on Jabber IM protocol).

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BuddySpace
awareness ofcolleagues presence
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Compendium
mapping real time discussions/group sensemaking

• Tool for real-time capture and visualisation of
  argumentation (collective sense-making and group
  memory).
• Based on gIBIS notions issues (questions),
  answers, arguments (pros/cons), decisions, etc.
• Connecting ideas visually, by sets, metadata and
  hypertext links.
• Free-form and template-driven discussions.
• Underlying XML representations interoperable
  with other tools via Jabber.

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mapping real time discussions/group sensemaking
Compendium mapping arguments and decision
rationale
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mapping real time discussions/group sensemaking
Compendium meeting template
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I-X
enacting decisions/coordinating activities
synthesising artifacts

• I-X technology provides an environment for
  handling issues, performing activities, placing
  constraints, etc.
• Founded on generic ltI-N-C-Agt activity ontology.
• CoAKTinG roles
• Support meeting environment set-up activities
• Support meeting process activities
• Networked To-Do lists for issue-handling and
  activity tracking.

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I-X
enacting decisions/coordinating activities
synthesising artifacts
Process Panel (I-P2)
Activity Editor
Domain Editor (I-DE)
Messenger
I-Space
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Record and Replay
recovering information from meetings

• Capturing meetings, experiments, visualisations
• Many potential information streams video, audio,
  Powerpoint, Jabber, Compendium
• for context-rich playback.
• Ontology-based approach - annotation of streams
  allows synchronised playback, smart navigation,
  etc
• Interlinks information using Semantic Web
  technologies.

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Meeting replay by time, speaker, contribution to
discussion, and decision
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to Support and Enhance e-Science Collaborations
awareness ofcolleagues presence
BuddySpace
Access Grid Node
virtual meetings
mapping real time discussions/group sensemaking
NetMeeting
recovering information from meetings
enacting decisions/coordinating activities
synthesising artifacts
I-X Tools

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Summary

• Contemporary Grid computing is about virtual
  organisations.
• Virtual organisations bring expertise and
  resource together dynamically to enable new
  research.
• Tools include
• Access Grid.
• Instant messaging with presence.
• Mapping meetings.
• Process support.
• Capture and replay.

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CoAKTinG Links

• CoAKTinG Project
• www.aktors.org/coakting
• BuddySpace
• kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/buddyspace
• Compendium
• kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/compendium
• I-X
• i-x.info
• Replay
• www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/projects/hystream