Using the Sakai collaborative toolkit in e-Research applications

Abstract

The Sakai Project ( http://www.sakaiproject.org ) is developing a collaborative environment that provides capabilities that span teaching and learning as well as e-Research applications. By exploiting the significant requirements overlap in the collaboration space between these areas, the Sakai community can harness significant resources to develop an increasingly rich set of collaborative tools. While collaboration is a significant element of many e-Research projects, there are many other important elements including portals, data repositories, compute resources, special software, data sources, desktop applications, and content management/e-Publication. The successful e-Research projects will find ways to harness all of these elements to advance their science in the most effective manner. It is critical to realize that there is not a single software product that can meet the requirements for such a rich e-Research effort. Realizing that multiple elements must be integrated together for best effect leads us to focus on understanding the nature of integration and working together to improve the cross-application integration. This leads us not to drive towards a single toolkit (such as Sakai or Globus), but instead to a meta-toolkit containing well-integrated applications. When considering a technology for use, perhaps the most important aspect of that technology is how well it integrates with other technologies. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.