TY - GEN
T1 - Building a geocollaboratory
T2 - Supporting Human-Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) collaborative science activities
AU - MacEachren, Alan M.
AU - Pike, William
AU - Yu, Chaoqing
AU - Brewer, Isaac
AU - Gahegan, Mark
AU - Weaver, Stephen D.
AU - Yarnal, Brent
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. BCS-9978052 and ITR (EAR)-0225673 (GEON). We wish to acknowledge the more than three dozen REU students who have participated in the HERO project and whose use of the methods and tools described has helped to assess and refine them. In addition, we thank Biliang Zhou for his help in conducting some tests of our synchronous collaboration tools, Jason Heffner from Penn State’s Information Technology Services for help with video meeting technology, and James Myers from the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory for his help in adapting the EMSL-ELN to HERO activities. Finally, we acknowledge support from the IBM Academic Initiative (formerly called the IBM Scholars Program) that supports use of IBM products (at no charge) for teaching and research – this program provided use of Lotus SameTime and technical support in setting up our SameTime server.
PY - 2006/3
Y1 - 2006/3
N2 - Collaboratories have been defined as centers without walls, virtual places where teams of scientists can undertake coordinated research. As part of the Human-Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) infrastructure project, we have been developing a geocollaboratory to support work by geographically distributed scientists about geographic problems. Our specific focus is on science teams developing and applying protocols for long-term study of the local and regional scale human impacts of global environmental change. The HERO geocollaboratory includes web and other Internet-based tools to enable same-time and different-time (thus synchronous and asynchronous) different-place collaboration. Methods and tools have been developed to support (1) synchronous distributed meetings that include video links and shared visual display of geospatial information; (2) asynchronous perspective comparison and consensus building activities; and (3) long-term information sharing and knowledge development. This paper introduces the research effort, sketches the conceptual framework within which the geocollaboratory is being developed, outlines progress thus far in the three collaboratory components listed above, and discusses our experiences using these tools for distributed science as well as our plans for continued development. We direct specific attention to three web-based, collaborative tools we have developed in support of components 2 and 3 above: an e-Delphi tool (supporting sharing and comparing of expert opinions), a concept-mapping tool that supports building, sharing, and comparing concept relationship diagrams linked to formal ontologies, and a web portal (called Codex) that provides a personal workspace, mechanisms for forming groups and accessing group resources, and methods for encoding knowledge objects that include geographic referencing.
AB - Collaboratories have been defined as centers without walls, virtual places where teams of scientists can undertake coordinated research. As part of the Human-Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) infrastructure project, we have been developing a geocollaboratory to support work by geographically distributed scientists about geographic problems. Our specific focus is on science teams developing and applying protocols for long-term study of the local and regional scale human impacts of global environmental change. The HERO geocollaboratory includes web and other Internet-based tools to enable same-time and different-time (thus synchronous and asynchronous) different-place collaboration. Methods and tools have been developed to support (1) synchronous distributed meetings that include video links and shared visual display of geospatial information; (2) asynchronous perspective comparison and consensus building activities; and (3) long-term information sharing and knowledge development. This paper introduces the research effort, sketches the conceptual framework within which the geocollaboratory is being developed, outlines progress thus far in the three collaboratory components listed above, and discusses our experiences using these tools for distributed science as well as our plans for continued development. We direct specific attention to three web-based, collaborative tools we have developed in support of components 2 and 3 above: an e-Delphi tool (supporting sharing and comparing of expert opinions), a concept-mapping tool that supports building, sharing, and comparing concept relationship diagrams linked to formal ontologies, and a web portal (called Codex) that provides a personal workspace, mechanisms for forming groups and accessing group resources, and methods for encoding knowledge objects that include geographic referencing.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2005.10.005
DO - 10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2005.10.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33644618835
SN - 0198-9715
VL - 30
SP - 201
EP - 225
JO - Computers, Environment and Urban Systems
JF - Computers, Environment and Urban Systems
ER -