Office of Instructional and Research Technology: SAKAI COLLABRORATORIES

SAKAI COLLABRORATORIES

Sakai at Rutgers

Sakai , a higher education community project to develop and support a new collaboration and learning environment.

What opportunities are there for collaboratories in research?

"NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Council has initiated a comprehensive strategic planning process to guide the agency's investments in cyberinfrastructure - the IT-based infrastructure increasingly essential to progress in science and engineering. The agency's plans are being developed in a document entitled NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery." The working draft of NSF's "CyberInfrastructure Vision for the 21st Century Discovery" includes strategic planning for Collaboratories, Observatories, and Virtual Organizations (2006-2010). In addition, NIH and other agencies listed on MAGPI's Resources web site are placing more emphasis on collaborations.

the CUASHI Hydrology Information System (HIS) Status report

the CLEANER/CUAHSI site
the CUAHSI site
Another interesting research collaboratory on watershed research in the EU

What is a Collaboratory?

A working definition found at the Science of Collaboratories web site is:

A collaboratory is a network-based facility and organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, fosters contact between researchers who are both known and unknown to each other, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks.

To better understand this term, refer to Science of Collaboratories web site. Note that possible synonyms include "virtual teams" and eResearch. Highlights are listed below:

Links to other resources
Findings from studying collaboratories
Bibliography of Collaboratories
List of collaboratories both collected and submitted
- Rutgers was identified as participant in the following Collaboratories:
- Other interesting collaboratories with K-12 involvement

Sakai's Collarboration Environment increases capabilities

Here are a some interesting references regarding the use of Sakai in Research Collaborations. OIRT will begin looking into installing additional tools at the end of 2005 that could aid project management, gathering of statistical data, grid management, etc. If you are interested in this capability, please let us know at oirt@rutgers.edu.

NEESGrid (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) is regularly highlighted as a collaboratory which is documented at LINK
- GECSR (A Grid-Enabled Collaboratory for Scientific Research), a power point summary, can be downloaded from LINK as 2004_10_15_nees_v01.ppt Note that there are many more related presentations here.
NCeSS (National Centre for e-Social Science) engages Economists and Social Scientists in eResearch.
- ReDReSS (Resource Discovery in e-Social Science) presentation can be downloaded LINK .
Cyberinfrastructure: "Converging Streams of Activity: Collaboratories, GRIDS, and eScience" presentation can be downloaded from LINK
CREW - Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work
Michigan Grid Research and Infrastructure Development Website
Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE) Collaboratory: The OGCE produces free, open source software for building Grid Computing Portals, and they welcome contributions. This site has been built with OGCE Release 1 software, so feel free to create an account and try things out.
- National Fusion Collaboratory Project
- NSF's Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project
- NASA funded QuakeSim/SERVOGrid project for earthquake modeling and forecasting
- NSF Teragrid User Portal is being built with OGCE software
- The University of Alabama, Birmingham is using OGCE portal software to build the front end to the UABGrid
- OGCE software is being used to develop the NSF's Southern California Earthquake Center's digital library portal.
Sakai Conference, December 7-9, is planning to have an eResearch track.