NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competencies and with regard for appropriate balance.
This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors according to procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting of members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.
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The National Research Council was organized by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy's purposes of furthering knowledge and advising the federal government. Functioning in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy, the Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in providing services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The Council is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Frank Press and Dr. Robert M. White are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the National Research Council.
Support for this project was provided by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. CDA-9021110).
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Copyright 1993 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
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COMMITTEE ON A NATIONAL COLLABORATORY: DEVELOPING THE USER-DEVELOPER PARTNERSHIP
VINTON G. CERF,
Corporation for National Research Initiatives,
Chairman
ALASTAIR G.W. CAMERON,
Harvard College Observatory,
Vice-Chairman
JOSHUA LEDERBERG,
Rockefeller University
CHRISTOPHER T. RUSSELL,
University of California at Los Angeles
BRUCE R. SCHATZ,
University of Arizona
PETER M.B. SHAMES,
California Institute of Technology
LEE S. SPROULL,
Boston University
ROBERT A. WELLER,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
WILLIAM A. WULF,
University of Virginia
Staff
MARJORY S. BLUMENTHAL, Director
MONICA KRUEGER, Staff Officer
ARTHUR L. McCORD, Project Assistant (through February 1993)
LESLIE M. WADE, Project Assistant
COMPUTER SCIENCE AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS BOARD
WILLIAM A. WULF,
University of Virginia,
Chairman
RUZENA BAJCSY,
University of Pennsylvania
DAVID J. FARBER,
University of Pennsylvania
SAMUEL H. FULLER,
Digital Equipment Corporation
JAMES GRAY,
Digital Equipment Corporation
JOHN L. HENNESSY,
Stanford University
MITCHELL D. KAPOR,
Electronic Frontier Foundation
SIDNEY KARIN,
San Diego Supercomputer Center
RICHARD M. KARP,
University of California at Berkeley
KEN KENNEDY,
Rice University
ROBERT L. MARTIN,
Bell Communications Research
ABRAHAM PELED,
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
WILLIAM PRESS,
Harvard College
RAJ REDDY,
Carnegie Mellon University
JEROME SALTZER,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
CHARLES L. SEITZ,
California Institute of Technology
MARY SHAW,
Carnegie Mellon University
EDWARD SHORTLIFFE,
Stanford University School of Medicine
IVAN E. SUTHERLAND,
Sun Microsystems
LAWRENCE T. TESLER,
Apple Computer Inc.
MARJORY S. BLUMENTHAL, Director
HERBERT S. LIN, Senior Staff Officer
MONICA KRUEGER, Staff Officer
GREG MEDALIE, Staff Officer
FRANK PITTELLI, CSTB Consultant
RENEE A. HAWKINS, Staff Associate
DONNA F. ALLEN, Administrative Assistant
LESLIE WADE, Project Assistant
COMMISSION ON PHYSICAL SCIENCES, MATHEMATICS, AND APPLICATIONS
RICHARD N. ZARE,
Stanford University,
Chairman
JOHN A. ARMSTRONG,
IBM Corporation
PETER J. BICKEL,
University of California at Berkeley
GEORGE F. CARRIER,
Harvard University
GEORGE W. CLARK,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MARYE ANNE FOX,
University of Texas
AVNER FRIEDMAN,
University of Minnesota
SUSAN L. GRAHAM,
University of California at Berkeley
NEAL F. LANE,
Rice University
ROBERT W. LUCKY,
Bell Communications Research
CLAIRE E. MAX,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
CHRISTOPHER F. McKEE,
University of California at Berkeley
JAMES W. MITCHELL,
AT&T Bell Laboratories
RICHARD S. NICHOLSON,
American Association for the Advancement of Science
ALAN SCHRIESHEIM,
Argonne National Laboratory
A. RICHARD SEEBASS III,
University of Colorado
KENNETH G. WILSON,
Ohio State University
NORMAN METZGER, Executive Director
Preface
On December 13, 1991, at the request of the National Science Foundation, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council convened the Committee on a National Collaboratory: Establishing the User-Developer Partnership. The committee was charged to study and report on the need for and potential of information technology to support collaboration in the conduct of scientific research. An increasing number of scientific problems call for or would benefit from collaboration among researchers, while improvements in the capabilities, ease of use, and availability of computing and communications systems suggest that information technology can facilitate and enable collaboration.
The concept of a national collaboratory was first explored in a white paper written by William Wulf while he was assistant director of the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.1 Dr. Wulf coined the term "collaboratory" by combining the words "collaboration" and "laboratory." Initially proposed as a single all-encompassing entity, a national collaboratory was defined in the white paper as ''a center without walls, in which the nation's researchers can perform their research without regard to geographical location—interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries." The proposed collaboratory depended on a network of computers to perform its functions, but it was more than a mere interconnection of computers; it was envisioned as offering a complete infrastructure of software, hardware, and networked resources to enable a full range of collaborative work among scientists.
The national collaboratory concept was further explored in March 1989 at a 2-day workshop organized by biologist Joshua Lederberg and information technologist Keith Uncapher and held at the Rockefeller University. The workshop enthusiastically endorsed the concept and in general terms identified the technologies and services that would have to exist or be developed to provide the necessary infrastructure. The report of that workshop2 and the diagram of collaboratory technologies (Appendix A) produced by Mark Stefik proved valuable resources for this committee.
This report is the result of a year-long effort to study the needs of scientists for computing and information technology to facilitate collaboration, and to relate those needs to the development and use of collaboratories.
The members of the committee met frequently during 1992 both in face-to-face discussions and by teleconference. To obtain information about scientists' requirements for collaboration and supporting technology and to get feedback on how collaboratories and information technology might facilitate research in the sciences, the committee held three 2-day workshops in specific disciplines: molecular
biology (specifically genome research), oceanography, and space physics (Appendix B). These disciplines were chosen because they represent big and small science, a wide spectrum of technical and theoretical sophistication, and a broad range of institutions and styles of research, and they derive support from a variety of sources, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Energy. The workshops provided a rare opportunity for participants—scientists actively doing research in molecular biology, oceanography, and space physics; scientists and technologists specializing in computing, communications, and information science; and a sociologist specializing in the use of computing technology by scientists—to consider together a number of issues affecting the potential to build useful collaboratories.
As the study progressed, the idea of developing a single national collaboratory was replaced by the idea of developing multiple scientific collaboratories. These collaboratories would share network and computing resources, software, and infrastructure but would have unique features dictated by the needs of particular scientific disciplines. Recognition of those varying needs drove the shift in focus from a single national collaboratory to many scientific collaboratories.
Much of the report writing and editing was carried out using electronic mail on the Internet. The report's first four chapters relate the needs of scientists for information technology, generally to support collaboration and specifically to develop collaboratories. Chapters 2 and 3 address collaboration challenges and opportunities in oceanography and space physics, respectively. Chapter 4 examines a computationally intensive branch of molecular biology, genome research, and provides an information technologist's perspective on the building and designing of collaboratories to support genome studies. Chapter 5 provides a synthesis of the committee's observations on collaboratories, and Chapter 6 contains the committee's recommendations.
The time and talents of many people contributed to this report. The creative and thoughtful contributions of the workshop participants were essential to the committee's work. The committee thanks Tom Dickey of the University of Southern California for his substantial contributions to the report and the oceanography workshop, Bob Kahn of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and Connie Pechura of the Institute of Medicine for their wise counsel, and the anonymous reviewers for their thought-provoking comments. The committee is also grateful to David Kingsbury of the George Washington University Medical Center; Peter Pearson of the Genome Data Base at Johns Hopkins University, who helped clarify the discussion of issues in genome research; John Wooley of the Department of Energy; and Chris Overton of the University of Pennsylvania. Of course, responsibility for the final content rests with the committee members.
Vinton G. Cerf, Chairman
Alastair G.W. Cameron, Vice-Chairman
Committee on a National Collaboratory: Establishing the User-Developer Partnership