e-Collaboration Workshop - Access Grid, Portals and other Virtual Research Environments for the Social Sciences

Organisers

Dr Rob Allan, Daresbury Laboratory, UK

Dr Rob Crouchley, University of Lancaster, UK

Mr Michael Daw University of Manchester, UK

Summary

This workshop addresses the increasing interest in and use of e-Collaboration, focusing on work in the areas of Access Grid, portals and other Virtual Research Environments. Its aim is to publicise recent developments in these areas and to further enhance the building of both development and user communities.

There are now almost 80 Access Grid nodes registered throughout academia in the UK, with this number growing all the time through more widespread use by new communities, as well as growth in the population who already use it as part of their normal daily work. The technology is used for meetings, seminars, research and for advanced collaborations, such as large-scale computational steering and discussion of data visualizations. The UK Access Grid Support Centre has recently conducted a survey addressing concerns about the quality of collaboration experienced using this technology and is undergoing a review of services offered to improve the user experience through increased quality and wider functionality. In addition to this, a major reworking of the media tools that underpin the Access Grid (VIC and RAT) is underway that should yield results in terms of reliability and improved features.

Many AG users will also simultaneously access collaboration tools provided through a portal, which can be projected onto the AG wall. These are be used for chat (in addition to the AG Jabber client), sharing of documents, and review of e-mail and discussion threads. This is particularly useful in a semi-formal virtual meeting situation. Work in the VRE projects is aiming to enhance this experience for a wide range of user communities more or less acquainted with traditional distributed computing technology.

For those teams and research groups that do not have access to an AG node but want to have the advantages of virtual presence, remote discussion through audio and video conference, sharing documents, data visualization, etc. a new family of tools is been developed in the Sakai VRE Demonstrator project. These tools are being developed first with users in mind, keeping the functionality not only powerful but easy to use, simple to configure and available from anywhere. Any user with just a computer and an Internet connection, with no special skills in computing will be able, for example, to setup a conference with different people and share his desktop in order to work on some document with them in just a few minutes. Portal tools and AG can also be used simultaneously in a complementary way.

Currently, this suite of tools consists of an audio/ video conference tool, a shared-desktop tool, a whiteboard tool and a web-blog. Although each of them can be used in an independent way, there are obvious advantages in using them as a suite. Each of these tools will be able to communicate and interact with the others. For example, it will be possible to pass a screenshot from the shared-desktop tool, which can be showing a picture, to the whiteboard, allowing the session participants to annotate it in a collaborative way. Meanwhile you can keep in contact through a video conference or take notes in the web-blog to make them available for subsequent discussion. Another very important aspect is that these tools will be able to record the sessions, retaining all the important information for possible post analysis.

Although this tool suite it is being developed for the Sakai framework, the set of technologies that are being used will permit them to be deployed, with minor development in most portal frameworks, bringing the advantages of this suite to any VRE and their users.
Both Access Grid and portals are major areas of development within the JISC Virtual Research Environment programme. This programme aims to help researchers in all disciplines manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research by providing a framework of resources to support the underlying processes of research on both small and large scales. There are 15 projects funded in the current call and this workshop would also allow space to disseminate current activities in this area. Whilst AG and portal work is currently symbiotic, we look toward a closer linking of the technologies in future, e.g. through the provision of integrated portal and AG services which can be used in other VRE applications.