Building collaboration tools and access to on-line facilities

Network-based facilities will allow researchers at different locations to collaborate on experiments as if they all were together in the same laboratory. The expected value of these geographically distributed environments includes substantially increased effectiveness in doing science, and an enabling capability for analytical and high-value production use by industry. The Distributed, Collaboratory Experiment Environments (DCEE) Program consists of four projects that were established to build prototype remote experiment and collaborative environments. The work undertaken in this project represents some of the research and development of the mechanisms and infrastructure required to make collaboratories a reality. Some of these mechanisms have already been developed. Several other mechanisms, such as data dissemination, resource management for the sharing of experiment control, safety and security, electronic notebooks, elements of telepresence, and integrated user interfaces need further research and development. The pilot application for these collaborative tools is the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Beamline 7.0 at the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The ALS is a particle accelerator and is a source of very high brilliance soft X-ray beams. One experimental facility is the Spectro-Microscopy Facility Beamline 7.0. Through this project, the Spectro-Microscopy Facility will be opened up to users from a wide range of organizations. The goal is to build software that will not only put the ALS Beamline 7.0 on-line, but will also serve as building blocks for future collaboratory development