• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.146-157
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• 2003

Our experience with Internet-based scientific collaboratories indicates that they need to be user-extensible, allow users to add tools and objects dynamically to workspaces, per mit users to move work dynamically between private and shared workspaces, and be easily accessible on the Internet. We present the software architecture of a development environment, called Collaboratory Builder's Environment(CBE), for building collaboratories to meet such needs. CBE provides user extensibility by allowing a collaboratory to be constructed as a collection of collaborative applets. To support dynamic reconfiguration of shared workspaces, CBE uses the metaphor of room that can contain applets, users, and arbitrary data objects. Rooms can be used not only for synchronous collaboration but also for asynchronous collaboration by supporting persistence. For the access over the Internet room participants are given different roles with appropriate access rights. A prototype of the model has been implemented in Java and can be run from a Java-enabled Web browser. The implemented system had been used by 95 users including 79 space scientists around the world in a scientific campaign that ran for 4 days. The usage evaluation of the campaign is also presented.