At the national level, efforts are under way to deploy technology that enables researchers in multiple sites to acquire and synthesize information about their specific project. A step in this direction has been the development of the concept of the national collaboratory (see "National Collaboratories," National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1993).

The aspects of access and interaction with remote and unique facilities, as well as distributed interactions between people, are the focus of the prototype Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory, or UARC. Since September 1992, the Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE), in cooperation with the Atmospheric Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation, has funded this major collaboration testbed in the space science community.

The purpose of the testbed is to conduct computer science research in the design of electronic environments to support team collaboration. To do this, it is felt that progress can be accomplished most rapidly by using a testbed approach formed around a collaborating group in a real-world environment. Thus, UARC has been formed around the ongoing research activities among a group of space scientists, and it is focused on research activities being undertaken at the Sondrestrom Upper Atmospheric Research Facility in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.

UARC has been created using a user-oriented, rapid prototyping approach at the University of Michigan, SRI International, and the other testbed sites, including the Danish Meteorological Institute, the University of Maryland, and the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory. In this project, a multidisciplinary group of investigators is supported to conduct coordinated experimental research related to creating and evaluating distributed environments to support team science. The work is focused on the design and engineering of a group-centered computing environment for collaborative experimental operations using instruments located at the Sondrestrom Upper Atmospheric Research Facility.

A goal is to build a networked environment to support the coordinated collaborative research and interactive observational campaigns which use multiple instruments. These efforts are conducted by a distributed group of investigators located at their home institutions. An early public demonstration of UARC was given at the May 1993 meeting of the American Geophysical Union special session on Applications of Advanced Data Handling and Visualization Tools to Complex Problems in Space and Atmospheric Sciences (Clauer, et al, 1993).

The Sondrestrom Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory Testbed

The starting point of the UARC project is the telescience capabilities that were developed through support provided by the NASA Telescience Testbed Program. This program provided the support to enable the ability to remotely display real-time data collected by the incoherent scatter radar at the Sondrestrom facility. This also provides the enabling capability now for the much more ambitious goals of UARC.

The instruments presently supported to participate in the UARC testbed, their principal investigators, and their institutional affiliations include:

1. Incoherent scatter radar, John Kelly, SRI International
2. Imaging riometer, Peter Stauning, Danish Meteorological Institute and Ted Rosenberg, University of Maryland
3. Magnetometer, Eigil Friis-Christensen, Danish Meteorological Institute
4. Fabry Perot interferometer and optical spectrometers and photometers, Rick Niciejewski and Timothy Killeen, University of Michigan
5. All-sky imaging television camera, Steve Mende, Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory.

We plan for the testbed to evolve in a phased way from a "wire service" phase to a fully shared electronic collaboration environment. We are presently in the wire service phase, using existing technology to provide the underlying testbed foundation. In this phase the instruments can generate a stream of data that is collected, stored, forwarded and displayed at all user sites. The wire service phase is evolving to a "point and talk" phase that allows researchers to interact jointly while they are located at several distributed sites. We have entered this phase with the implementation of a set of simple communications windows that broadcast discussion to all interactive users.

New developments in this phase will include shared windows, shared annotation to data and to graphics, electronic blackboards (drawing windows), and voice communications. The fully shared control phase builds upon the point and talk phase to provide more natural and fluid group interactions and the remote control of instruments.

As an example of the user-oriented direction of this project, we have identified the need to review collected data and discuss it at later times because of the time zone distribution of the group. Thus, tools which support synchronous real-time interactions are being designed to also support asynchronous collaboration. Such tools could, for example, permit a researcher to play back data from various instruments collected during a previous data collection interval, annotate the data, discuss the results using voice, and encapsulate all of this into a file which could be sent to a colleague who could play back the discussion on his or her own workstation. The colleague could edit the file to add value by including comments and annotation, and send the file back.

Because the UARC project is composed of relatively few individuals and sites, we have chosen the luxury of performing the development within a homogenous computing environment. This limits our concern with interoperability issues among various different computers and operating systems. For this project, we are using NeXT workstations and the NeXTStep Interface Builder and operating system. NeXTStep was chosen because it tightly integrates both the operating system, supporting software, and development environment under a unifying object-oriented software library. NeXTStep also allows software objects running on one workstation to be easily accessed from other workstations on the Internet. This supports the modular development of distributed user-oriented software in an evolutionary fashion. It represents, in our opinion, the best existing example of the type of computing environment which will become common in the future. The use of the interface building tools, distributed object support and object-oriented computing environment has enabled us to pursue a rapid-prototyping approach to system design, deployment, and evaluation that would have been difficult with any other available operating system and user interface. For example, we have implemented two major versions of the system in a period of six months.

CREW