A Collaboratory for the Distributed Collaborations Within a Biosecurity Laboratory and Across Different Organizations

Abstract

This paper presents our work in the design and development of collaborative platforms to support distributed scientific collaborations in a national biosecurity laboratory which carries out diagnostics and research work in animal diseases. We have focused on two types of collaboration challenges. One is the “distributed” collaborations between scientists working inside the physical containment areas and scientists working in the general office area within the laboratory. The second is the collaborative diagnosis and decision-making work between this laboratory and other organizations working on the responses of emergency animal diseases. The “biosecurity collaboration platform” which addresses the first challenge has been implemented and used by the scientists in the laboratory. The platform integrates shared digital workspaces and supports the sharing and interaction of scientific data from various resources and laboratory instruments (e.g. microscopes). The “secure collaboration platform” which addresses the second challenge is an extension of the biosecurity collaboration platform and integrates eAuthentication and eAuthorization technologies to support secure communication and information sharing between experts from different organizations. Results from user studies have shown that the collaboration platforms can provide core capabilities of communication, trustworthy information sharing and access to real-time data from scientific instruments in complex collaborations in the biosecurity domain.