A Web-based Collaboratory for Supporting Environmental Science Research

A scientific collaboratory for supporting research in the field of environmental science is presented in this paper. The purpose for building this Web-based research support system is to promote collaboration among a geographically separated group of NSF sponsored scientists from different research areas and allow them to share their data and information across distributed sites. An XML-based Markup Language, NOML, is provided to build the XML-based Web components and facilitate Web services development in the future. This collaboratory also consists of a set of on-line simulators with an intelligent interface for guiding simulation configuration and various electronic communication tools. The development of this collaboratory takes advantage of the J2EE and RDBMS technologies to provide scientists a robust and flexible environment to do science on the Web.