Project meetings are scheduled weekly, Monday 11 AM Pacific Time. Communications are via:
Project design discussions, status reports, meeting notes, etc. are stored in the SAM Project Notebook. Access is password restricted.
The SAM project website is maintained at PNNL. Shared read/write access for the project team will be implemented using the DAV protocol.
Source code, test suites, etc. will be stored in a shared CVS repository as described in the Software Engineering plan.
The SAM team anticipates coordination with other projects for a variety of purposes:
Specific efforts identified at this time include:
The CMCS project plans to develop mechanisms for the exchange of annotated data across several chemistry communities engaged in combustion-related research (e.g. quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, kinetics, fluid dynamics). As described in the proposal, CMCS anticipates using SAM services directly and incorporating SAM notebook capabilities into their user portal. Jim Myers, who, in addition to his role in SAM, will be acting as the Chief Technology Officer of the CMCS project, will be responsible for assuring that relevant information is exchanged between the projects. An initial coordination meeting(s) will be scheduled once both projects are underway.
The SAM project is housed within the SCE group at PNNL and it is anticipated that SAM will become part of an emerging Collaborative Problem Solving Environment architecture used by SCE in a variety of projects across science and engineering. One particular example of this is the Extensible Computational Chemistry Environment (ECCE) which has recently converted its data storage mechanism to use the DAV protocol in anticipation of using SAM as a means to allow ECCE to interact with electronic notebooks, feature detection agents, etc. SAM capabilities will be described in internal PNNL seminars and as projects are identified that are interested in making use of SAM, a member of the SAM team will be assigned as a liaison.
DOE2000 notebooks have been deployed to a wide variety of sites. Mailing lists for these notebooks include thousands of people. Although the vast majority of these people represent small projects, a few are involved in efforts of significant size that may be interested in contributing to the requirements and design of SAM (versus just having an interest in the end result). An invitation to participate in discussions of SAM's design will be sent to these mailing lists. Interested parties will be contacted to determine what level of interaction would be appropriate.
This project plans to develop material to guide the evaluation of collaboratories including surveys to obtain feedback on the use of collaborative software and suggestions for instrumenting collaborative software for automated analysis. SAM staff will track these efforts, potentially participating in the development of relevant material, and will incorporate them into SAM's software design and outreach efforts.
The SAM project will continue discussions with laboratory records managers, begun in the DOE2000 electronic notebook project, concerning the technical requirements and acceptable procedures for the use of electronic notebooks as official records. These discussions will be used to guide the development of SAM's Notebook Services layer.
Initial contact has ben made with Rich Keller, NASA Ames, who is developing metadata management capabilities for astrobiology. Rich believes their requirements could be instructive for SAM and sees the potential for long term collaboration in developing capabilities for semantic linkages between scientific annotations. A visit by Jim Myers to NASA Ames, coordinated with several other activities in the area, is being planned for early October, 2001.
A variety of organizations are developing technologies and standards relevant to SAM. The Grid community is developing standards for security and event services as well as defining the requirements of problem solving environments and portals. The SciDAC and National Collaboratory programs plan to promote shared infrastructure and shared architectural concepts across projects. Organizations such as the Collaborative Electronic Notebook Systems Association , which is attempting to promote and standardize electronic notebook services, and the Semantic Web Community are also developing technologies and standards relevant to SAM. The SAM team will track efforts in these communities and become actively involved in specific standardization efforts as appropriate. An initial effort in this area will be the development of a project knowledge base concerning technology and standards efforts that will support design decisions.