SUPPORT COLLABORATION GEOSCIENCES RESEARCH THROUGH THE GEON PORTAL

Successful collaborations are crucial to geosciences research. In this demo we will demonstrate all the aspects of the MyProjects system in the GEON portal for supporting geosciences collaborations. The goal is motivated by the observation that most geosciences projects have multiple researchers, often at multiple sites with different schedules. It is therefore difficult to share information, coordinate tasks, and maintain consistency. Many successful experiences have been proved that modern information technologies such as forum, wiki and many other tools offer the better opportunities to reduce the difficulty. We seek to organize these cooperative tools in a better way with other cyber-infrastructure technologies to support distributed cooperative work in a geosciences environment.

MyProjects is a system in the GEON portal which allows users to create new projects and add other people into the project teams. The notion of project is a very flexible concept. It supports not only simple personal tasks but also large organization tasks. Four predefined roles in the system are listed as following based on decreased privileges: leader, contributor, observer and guest, that is, a leader can do whatever a contributor can do in a project, etc. A specific role is assigned to each team member.

By default each project is consists of nine main components: configuration management, team, a news board, wiki, discussion forums, to-do lists, project planning, problem reporting and some space for sharing resources,. Each part has several operations that can apply to it, and each operation is associated with a lowest role. A team member can do an operation only if his/her role is not lower than the lowest role of the operation. For instance, four operations can be applied to a project team: view team members, view team member email addresses, modify team and modify team member role. By default the lowest role associated with viewing team member email addresses is observer; so a guest won't be able to see email addressed of other team members.

The configuration management component provides the capability of customizing project components and changing the lowest role of each operation for the selected components. For example, a project may decide not to have any forum and wiki and allows only leaders and contributors to viewing team member email addresses.

Adding new members into a project team can be done by sending email invitation or input people from other project teams. Once person accepts the invitation, he/she is assigned an initial role as contributor. But this can be changed by a person who can modify the team.

Project news including news drafts, unreleased news and current news can be posted on the news board. By default, only project leaders can delete news; contributors can add news into the board, and edit existing news, and view unreleased news; observers can check archived news, and guests only can read the current news. Users also can choose whether send released news via email to all project members when the news is post.

The project wiki is an effective place for mass collaborative authoring that allows contributors to add, remove, edit and change content with links to other resources. Project forums build some online discussion groups for contributors to exchange open messages on any interesting topics.

Project task management is supported by three components: to-do lists, project planning and problem reporting. A to-do list usually contains several tasks that need to be done. The tasks can be closed when they're completed. Important dates in a project's timeline can be setup as milestones by using the project planning component, so that every contributor knows what needs to be done by what time. Troubles like data quality and trouble with hardware and software in a project can be reported through the problem report component. When a problem is reported, a team member can be assigned to solve the problem. A problem can be closed after it is solved by reporting what has been done.

MyProjects provides some storage space for each project to share resources with other project members. Contributors can create folders and upload files into the folders. The system has a built in version control system let contributors upload new versions to existing files saved in the system. Resources found by GEON search also can be saved in the project space.

A search engine is available in MyProjects to find news, discussion messages and resources in project space. A user can choose to search in all the participated projects or just in a single project. Some MyProjects functions like computational job monitoring and resource integration tools are still under design or development.