Collaborative Expeditions through Remote Scientific Data via the Internet

Current techniques for providing collaborative visual analysis of remote scientific data using the Internet are reviewed. It is shown why the tools in common use today, such as Microsoft’s NetMeeting, do not provide scientists with highly interactive viewing of high resolution dynamic scenes of remote data when using typical Internet connections. New tools that do provide these capabilities in both synchronous and asynchronous collaborations have been developed and tested and are described in this paper. The significance of these new tools is the following capabilities they provide to scientists: 1. The capability to access remote data and conduct individual or collaborative explorations through the data using highly interactive viewing of high resolution dynamic scenes. 2. The capability to record those explorations for later review by others. 3. The capability to publish reports on the Web containing a rich variety of guided expeditions (recorded explorations) through the remote data. Each expedition is automatically launched when it is selected from a Web page within their report. 4. The capability to experience other scientists’ published expeditions through the data, the capability to modify or extend those expeditions with new “what if” explorations, and the capability to publish these new explorations back to the Web for others to experience. 5. The capability to experience an author’s published expeditions through the data and then make a live connection with the author and/or other remote colleagues to conduct a synchronous collaborative extended exploration through the data. This new exploration can then be published to the Web. Testing of these tools proved that they provide highly interactive viewing of high resolution dynamic scenes of the data even in collaborations between continents. Index Terms -Internet, Collaborative Work, Remote Visualization, Scientific Visualization.