To provide context and motivation for the project, the CoAKTinG tools are being developed and deployed in several scenarios.
e-Response is a simulated scenario in which a distributed team of specialist scientists use CoAKTinG tools to co-ordinate emergency enviromnental protection activities following an oil spill in the Solent.
As part of long-term research into manned Mars missions, NASA's Work Systems Design and Evaluation group conducts annual field trials of its agent-based software and robots at the Mars Society's Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah, USA. As a part of the most recent trial, several CoAKTinG tools have been used to support the collaboration that occurs between the astronauts on ``Mars'' and the distributed groups of support scientists on Earth (know as the Remote Science Team, RST, and in this particular case specialists in geology).
The Combechem project aims to enhance structure property correlation and prediction by increasing the amount of knowledge about materials via synthesis and analysis of large compound libraries. Automation of the measurement and analysis is required in order to do this efficiently and reliably while ensuring that wide dissemination of the information occurs together with all the necessary associated background (raw) data that is needed to specify the provenance of the material. The project aims for a complete end-to-end connection between the laboratory bench and the intellectual chemical knowledge that is published as a result of the investigation; this necessitates that all steps in the process are enhanced by a suitable digital environment. CombeChem has achieved many parts of this ambitious programme, e.g. the smart laboratory (smarttea.org), grid-enabled instrumentation, data tracking for analysis, methodology for publication@source, process and role based security and high throughput computation.
The CoAKTinG tools provide support for the e-Science process in CombeChem and they also enable the digitisation of 'missing links' in the processing chain which form part of the typical collaborative scientific processes that we are attempting to enhance using the grid infrastructure: support of the experimental process, tracking and awareness of people and machine states, capturing of the discussions about data as well as the traditional metadata, and enriched meta-data regarding these components to support interlinking.
