New tools, facilities, and technologies are rapidly changing the practice and pace of modern science. Collaborations frequently involve large communities and are increasingly more dependent on shared data and tools published by others. In conjunction with partners at a number of universities and national laboratories, we have developed a domain-independent architecture for supporting collaborative science.
This infrastructure, the Knowledge Environment for Collaborative Science (KnECS) [1] defines a multilayer architecture, that supports a web portal to allow users to interface with tools and collaborate with one another. The collaborative environment in KnECS provides support for teams and community interaction tools. KnECS also leverages Scientific Annotation Middleware (SAM) [2], which provides data and metadata services, such as searching, access control, automatic metadata extraction, data translations, and managing data provenance.
KnECS provides APIs for notifications, easy access to the data repository, and the construction of structured metadata, as well as templates for integrating new portlets into the Web portal. KnECS is available as open source software, and considerable development has been done to make the deployment of KnECS easy. By providing advanced provenance tracking, data interoperability, and multilevel application support in KnECS, this alllows the formation of knowledge grids for new science areas.
