Collaboratory Projects

Coco is a peer-to-peer (P2P) system that builds heavily on the facilities of the JXTA platform initiated by Sun Microsystems, Inc., a set of interoperable network protocols designed to support heterogeneous device connectivity in completely decentralised networks. P2P systems are networks in which every node is an equal participant in communication and interaction and there is an absence of any centralised administrative or coordinating authorities. The advantages of P2P include increased scalability, robustness, fault tolerance and resilience to attack. This project shows that the dynamic connectivity that characterises P2P networks is a significant benefit in supporting the spontaneous nature of collaboration.

MAST is a multicast application sharing tool, which has been developed to enhance group-to-group collaboration in the eMinerals project. It uses multicast to transport the application streams to the participants in the multicast group. The tool is specifically designed to be used with the Access Grid. Currently, the Access Grid has two main multicast tools a video tool VIC and the Robust Audio Tool (RAT). Traditionally Virtual Network Computing (VNC) has been used to share desktops between participants, the main problem with VNC's use in the Access Grid is that it does not use multicast, but instead sends duplicate data to each participant (putting undue load on the network).

In this project we will extend the Sakai open source and open standards portal framework. It will host a number of integrated tools and robust distributed services and become the principal user interface for a fully-functional Virtual Research Environment (VRE). To accomplish this, we will seek widespread community input to expose existing tools and services as Java portlets, SOAP-based or peer-to-peer Web services for use within the VRE. Using this approach, the project will create a long-lasting, maintainable and extensible VRE which will provide both reliable collaboration tools, together with a powerful distributed research toolset. Some of the VRE tools and services we want to expose are UK adaptations of those directly available from Sakai and OGCE, the US NMI portal. Others are to be achieved in association with a UK community of VRE users.