Collaborative Knowledge-Work Environments for Team Science: The Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory (SPARC) Project
Project Summary
Interdisciplinary research experience in the collaboratory concept will be used to design, deploy, evaluate, and enlarge the fundamental understanding of collaborative knowledge-work environments. They will focus and inform this research by the creation of a Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory (SPARC) of revolutionary scope and power. The work is based on the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC), in which over a six-year period a team of space physicists, computer scientists, and behavioral scientists evolved a suite of collaboration capabilities to provide rich, real-time access to a wide variety of data and modeling resources. The proposed work on SPARC will significantly extend the power of technology-mediated, distributed knowledge-networking systems. It combines experimental data streams and their interpretation, theoretical models, real-time campaign support, capture mid replay of collaborative sessions, post-hoc analysis workshops, access to archival data and digital libraries, and educational/outreach modules. An important outcome of SPARC for the science community will be a functional and operational space weather predictive capability. Equally important, SPARC will also be a major testbed to further understand and design collaborative knowledge work systems from a merger of social and technical principles.
The SPARC project aims to produce a next generation collaboratory that will support a fill range of scientific activities
