Scientific and engineering research increasingly involves multidisciplinary collaboration, sometimes across multiple organizations. Technological advances have made such crossboundary projects possible, yet they can carry high coordination costs. This study investigated scientific collaboration across disciplinary and university boundaries to understand the need for coordination in these collaborations and how different levels of coordination predicted success. We conducted a study of 62 scientific collaborations supported by a program of the United States National Science Foundation in 1998 and 1999. Projects with principal investigators (PIs) in more disciplines reported as many positive outcomes as did projects involving fewer disciplines. By contrast, multi-university, rather than multidisciplinary, projects were problematic. Projects with PIs from more universities were significantly less well coordinated and reported fewer positive outcomes than projects with PIs from fewer unive...

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases.

Advances in data acquisition and dissemination technologies, together with several other computer science technologies, provide an opportunity to define new environments for remote access to scientific instruments and collaboration between researchers at remote sites. These environments, called "collaboratories"[1], are intended to provide complete location-independent collaborative access to instruments, data acquisition and analysis resources, as well as to collaborating researchers. Over the past two years we have built a prototype collaboratory at the SpectroMicroscopy Facility of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Beamline 7.0 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The scientists who use the Beamline are based at different cities around the world. Before the introduction of the collaboratory, experiments at the Beamline required that multiple researchers travel to Berkeley, CA. With the collaboratory, scientists can now discuss experiments with other scientists around the world an...

The Grid is the computing and data management infrastructure that will provide the electronic underpinning for a global society in business, government, research, science and entertainment [1–5]. Grids, illustrated in Figure 1.1, integrate networking, communication, computation and information to provide a virtual platform for computation and data management in the same way that the Internet integrates resources to form a virtual platform for information. The Grid is transforming science, business, health and society. In this book we consider the Grid in depth, describing its immense promise, potential and complexity from the perspective of the community of individuals working hard to make the Grid vision a reality. Grid infrastructure will provide us with the ability to dynamically link together resources as an ensemble to support the execution of large-scale, resource-intensive, and distributed applications.

Modern computational structural biology requires scientists to employ a wide range of tools and techniques to solve complex problems while keeping accurate records of research activities. Additional complications are introduced by the need to effectively engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with geographically dispersed colleagues. The software BioCoRE, a collaborative research environment for molecular modeling and simulations, addresses these challenges. Initial design work has led to a web-based architecture focused on four primary interface paradigms: a workbench allows diverse computational tools to be applied to the problem at hand in a consistent manner, a notebook automates recording of research activities, electronic conferences held with collaborators can be saved and replayed, and multi-author documents can be prepared in a crossplatform revision control system. When complete, it is expected that the BioCoRE meta-application will drastically reduce the effort and expen...

1 Abstract (100 words) Multi-university collaborations draw on diverse resources and expertise but they impose coordination costs for bridging institutional differences and geographic distance. We report a study of the coordination activities and project outcomes of 491 research collaborations funded by the US National Science Foundation. Coordination activities, especially division of responsibility for tasks and knowledge transfer among investigators, predicted project outcomes (e.g., producing new knowledge, creating new tools, and training students). However, more universities involved in a collaboration predicted fewer coordination activities and fewer project outcomes. A statistical mediation analysis showed that insufficient coordination explained the negative relationship between multi-university collaboration and project outcomes.

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Abstract. This paper presents the results of our study regarding the different facets and ways of using annotations in both digital libraries and collaboratories. This study represents an innovative attempt at gathering methodological tools and synergies from both fields in order to effectively define a comprehensive model for annotations. Thus we propose a conceptual model for annotations in order to develop an annotation service that can be plugged into digital libraries and collaboratories. Finally, starting from our model, we introduce a search strategy for exploiting annotations in order to search and retrieve relevant documents for a user query. 1

Abstract. The cultural heritage domain dealing with digital surrogates of rare and fragile historic artifacts is one of the most promising areas for establishing collaboratories, i.e. shared virtual working environments for groups of users. However, in order to be considered a useful tool, such a system must reflect and support the specific tasks which are typical for the domain. The system design presented here takes into account a variety of activities, e.g., source analysis, which are supported by a task-specific selection of appropriate retrieval functions, e.g., access to OCR results and annotations. The tasks are explicitly modeled, thus the corresponding user interfaces can be automatically generated. Keywords. Cultural Heritage, Collaboratory, Task-based Retrieval 1 Digital Libraries in Cultural Heritage The cultural heritage domain differs considerably from “classical ” application scenarios for digital libraries. Access to existing collections of historical archive material is severely impeded due to the unavailability of electronic versions of the rare and fragile source artifacts. The digitization of such material and the storage into

CCF (Collaborative Computing Frameworks) is a suite of software systems, communications protocols, and tools that enable collaborative, computer-based cooperative work. CCF constructs a virtual work environment on multiple computer systems connected over the Internet, to form a Collaboratory. In this setting, participants interact with each other, simultaneously access and operate computer applications, refer to global data repositories or archives, collectively create and manipulate documents or other artifacts, perform computational transformations, and conduct a number of other activities via telepresence. Research issues addressed in this project include problem solving environments and methodologies for laboratory and instrument-based scientific disciplines, and computer science issues in heterogeneous distributed systems. New approaches are being investigated and developed for fast multiway communication, robust geographically distributed data management methodologies, high-perfo...