Importance of mutual benefits in online knowledge sharing communities

The sustainability of knowledge sharing e-communities is a major issue at present. A hypothesis was proposed at the outset in the paper that the provision of mutual benefits among participants will lead to positive participation. Drawing from the economic and social theories, a framework for analysis was developed and tested in an empirical study. The preliminary results demonstrated a direct relationship between mutual benefits and the level of participation, and hence supported the hypothesis

Deployment and performance evaluation of a SNAP-based resource broker on the White Rose grid

Resource brokering is an essential component in building effective Grid systems. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of a SNAP (Service Negotiation and Acquisition Protocol) based resource broker on a large distributed Grid infrastructure, the White Rose Grid. The broker uses a three-phase commit protocol to reserve resources on demand, as the traditional advance reservation facilities cannot cater for such needs due to the prior time that it requires to schedule reservations. Experiments are designed and carried out on the White Rose Grid. The experimental results show that the inclusion of the three-phase commit protocol provides a performance enhancement on a large distributed Grid Infrastructure, in terms of the time taken from submission of user requirements until a job begins execution. The results support those previously obtained through the use of mathematical modelling and simulation. The broker is a viable contender for use in future Grid resource brokering implementations

The integration of grid and peer-to-peer to support scientific collaboration

There have been a number of e-Science projects which address the issues of collaboration within and between scientific communities. Most effort to date focussed on the building of the Grid infrastructure to enable the sharing of huge volume of computational and data resources. The ‘portal’ approach has been used by some to bring the power of grid computing to the desk top of individual researchers. However, collaborative activities within a scientific community are not only confined to the sharing of data or computational intensive resources. There are other forms of sharing which can be better supported by other forms of architecture. In order to provide a more holistic support to a scientific community, this paper proposes a hybrid architecture, which integrates Grid and peer-to-peer technologies using Service Oriented Architecture. This platform will then be used for a semantic architecture which captures characteristics of the data, functional and process requirements for a range of collaborative activities. A combustion chemistry research community is being used as a case study

Use of scenario evaluation in preparation for deployment of a collaborative system for knowledge transfer - the case of KiMERA

This paper presented an approach for the evaluation of a collaborative system, after the completion of system development and software testing but before its deployment. Scenario and collaborative episodes were designed and data collected from users role-playing. This was found to be a useful step in refining the user training, in setting the right level of user expectation when the system started to roll-out to real users and in providing feedback to the development team

Collaborative e-science architecture for Reaction Kinetics research community

This paper presents a novel collaborative e-science architecture (CeSA) to address two challenging issues in e-science that arise from the management of heterogeneous distributed environments: (i) how to provide individual scientists an integrated environment to collaborate with each other in distributed, loosely coupled research communities where each member might be using a disparate range of tools; and (ii) how to provide easy access to a range of computationally intensive resources from a desktop. The Reaction Kinetics research community was used to capture the requirements and in the evaluation of the proposed architecture. The result demonstrated the feasibility of the approach and the potential benefits of the CeSA

Enabling e-Research in combustion research community

Abstract This paper proposes an application of the Collaborative e-Science Architecture (CeSA) to enable e-Research in combustion research community. A major problem of the community is that data required for constructing modelling might already exist but scattered and improperly evaluated. That makes the collection of data for constructing models difficult and time-consuming. The decentralised P2P collaborative environment of the CeSA is well suited to solve this distributed problem. It opens up access to scattered data and turns them to valuable resources. Other issues of the community addressed here are the needs for computational resources, storages and interoperability amongst different data formats can also be addressed by the use of Grid environment in the CeSA

A collaborative e-Science architecture towards a virtual research environment

This paper presents a novel Collaborative e-Science Architecture (CeSA) to address two challenging issues in e-Science that have arisen from the management of heterogeneous distributed environments. By combining the capabilities of peer-to-peer and Grid computing, the architecture provides an environment for scientific collaborations within distributed, loosely coupled research communities and brings computation and data intensive resources to the desktops of the scientists in these communities. The Reaction Kinetics research community had been used as a case study to capture realistic requirements. A prototype based on the architecture was developed for user experiment and evaluation. The results of these experiments were promising. It has provided further motivation to evolve CeSA towards a Virtual Research Environment