Systems Technology for Building a National Collaboratory

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This research is funded under the Special Initiative on Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology. This is one of eleven winners under that competition. This project is to develop the systems technology necessary to build a nationwide information infrastructure for the scientific community and to demonstrate this technology by applying it to a mini-collaboratory for a specific community of molecular biologist that studies the genetic structure of the C. Elegans nematode. The goals are to collect the community knowledge into a digital library, develop the technology to manipulate the library, and to learn how to facilitate effective utilization of this technology for sizeable communities. This mini-collaboratory will take advantage of the underlying communication support provided by NSFNET to support users nationwide. The researchers address several research problems necessary to the successful design of the mini-collaboratory. These include designing bulk transfer protocols that facilitate the rapid movement of data across wide area networks, discovering efficient data clustering and caching strategies, providing a uniform interface for displaying editing, searching and grouping a wide range of complex objects, and supporting directory services that can be used to locate many distributed resources.