GROUP

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Peter Dew
Karim Djemame
Lydia Lau
Alison Marshall
Mohammed Haji

RESEARCH

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EUROCHAMP-2
AWESOME
ISQoS

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SeCE
DAME
BROADEN
AssessGrid
Grid PPT
SeMEEP

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Project Objectives

Distributed global online communities play an increasingly important role in supporting international collaborations amongst scientists.  Developments in e-Science (now e- Research) reflect this, with Computer Scientists seeking to provide suitable IT infrastructures to support new large-scale virtual organizations (e.g. in the USA the National Virtual Observatory and the SCEC community modeling environment). 

Many of the system architecture issues are being addressed by system-level science but, so far, this has largely involved transferring traditional real world activities into the virtual environment, and has not examined what technologies would be needed to support self-sustaining scientific research communities. 

Our research studies more flexible, collaborative person-to-person systems where scientists exchange ideas, information and resources without going through a third party server (apart from the initial certificate-based authorisation).

A novel Scientific e-Community environment (SeCE) is being developed and evaluated underpinned by a collaborative P2P layer providing indirect access to Grid-level resources. The underlying technology is a highly distributed P2P and Grid computing platform supporting semantic web technologies.

Study the e-Research infrastructure for sustainability

The sustainability of any e-community depends on the value it represents to its stakeholders. The project seeks to address a number of key enabling issues for scientific e-community sustainability.  These include:

• The ability to create, validate and curate scientific data and computational models (provide valuable trusted content).
• The provision of a scientific e-community environment with scalable discovery of expertise and resources using evolving vocabulary classification tree of interest (provide scalability and interactive performance).
• Building and maintaining trust through the availability of validated data and models; enabling peers (people) to maintain ownership of personal resources and control they way they choose to share these with others in the e-community within a highly secure virtual environment (policy-based usage control).