Emanuele SantosE. Santos, P. Mates, E. Anderson, B. Grimm, J. Freire, and C. Silva. To- wards supporting collaborative data analysis and visualization in a coastal margin observatory. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Workshop on The Changing Dynamics of Scientific Collaborations, 2010.
Abstract
Managing and understanding the large volumes of scientific data is one of the most difficult challenges scientists face today. As interdisciplinary groups work together, the ability to generate a diversified collection of analyses for a broad audience and in an ad-hoc manner is essential to support effective data exploration. Science portals and Web-based visualization tools have been used to simplify this task by aggregating data from different sources and providing a set of pre-defined analyses and visualizations. These, however, are expensive to build and lack the flexibility necessary to support the vast heterogeneity of data sources, analysis techniques, and information needs from multiple user communities. In this paper, we present a system that adopts the model used by social Web sites and, by combining a set of usable tools and a scalable infrastructure, simplifies the construction of science collaboratories: Web sites where groups of users can collaboratively explore scientific data. An important feature of the system is that it allows users to easily customize and publish new analyses and visualizations on the Web. We also describe our implementation of a collaborative site for the NSF Science and Technology Center for Coastal Margin Observation & Prediction (CMOP).