Domain-Specific Groupware Environment for E-research on Chemistry

Abstract

E-Research aims to facilitate collaboration across time and distance. Researchers need techniques and tools to support their collaborative work. Groupware is one technique that supports groups of people engaging in a common task over the network. Besides, it is also one of the most effective means to solve the collaboration problem. Existing groupware projects provide fixed functions such as messaging, conferen- cing, electronic meeting, document management, document collaboration and so on.  However, they put limited emphasis on scientists’ research work in their specific fields. This paper proposes a groupware environment, and tries to give a domain-specific group editor to facilitate researchers’ collaboration. The groupware implements a visual molecule group editor for chemists to co-edit molecular structures over network. And it has a plug-in extensible architecture intending to easily integrate other tools which is useful for chemists’ collaboration. The idea given in this paper could be a possible solution to facilitate chemists’ collaborative research work.