Background

In early 1995 we began building a prototype collaboratory as part of the Distributed, Collaboratory Experiment Environments (DCEE) program. This collaboratory, the Spectro-Microscopy Collaboratory, provided remote operation of a sophisticated synchrotron-radiation beamline in the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. During implementation of the Spectro-Microscopy collaboratory, we identified several components that were needed by users to complete the collaboratory environment. We provided prototype versions of these tools to the collaboratory. The tools we developed turned out to be needed by several of the DCEE collaboratories, so we began work on versions that would be more robust and suitable to the general collaboratory environment. These tools include the conference controller , the remote camera control system , and the generic communication library, which provided the seed for the Collaboratory Interoperability Framework (CIF).

We have since been involved with several collaboratory development efforts, including the DOE 2000 pilot projects , a telepathology project , and several others. The experience we have gained during our collaboratory development efforts has helped us to identify the tools still needed to complete the collaboratory environment. The distributed collaboratories project allows us to continue to identify, design, and implement these essential tools. Our goal is to use as much of the existing technology and tools that are available and to augment these tools with the components needed to make them useful in a collaboratory.

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This document was last updated on October 26, 1999, and is located at http://www-itg.lbl.gov/Collaboratories/background.html.

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Credits:  Distributed Collaboratories research and development is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division. Support Credits identify the funding sources and the organizational context of the work described in this document.

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