The Grid Shared Desktop: a Bootstrapping Environment for Collaboration

The paradigm shift from an information sharing infrastructure (i.e., the Web) to a resource sharing infrastructure (i.e., the Grid) has boosted the development of a new generation of online services. In particular, Grid services are stateful, dynamic and operate in a secure environment. Therefore they offer capabilities that are essential to remote collaboration. In this paper, we tackle the problem of bootstrapping and supporting a collaborative environment over a Grid infrastructure. As we target communities of non computer-literate people, we investigate easy-to-use and flexible solutions. As a result, we developed the Grid Shared Desktop (GSD) a Grid-based, Webaccessible environment that provides members of a virtual community with a set of desktops supporting collaboration in both synchronous and asynchronous mode. A desktop is a familiar tool allowing users to interact with graphical representations of concepts. Thus, the GSD is a powerful interface to communicate these representations and build collaborative knowledge. In this paper, we propose an overall architecture and an implementation of the GSD including a bundled set of bootstrapping services required to set up and maintain a collaboration activity among distant participants. Finally, we summarise the results of recent experiments conducted with the GSD deployed in the concrete context of collaborative construction of a shared repository of knowledge.