Communications fabric for scientific collaboration

Abstract Today's fusion experiments are geographically and institutionally dispersed collaborations. This makes the need for good remote collaboration tools particularly acute. Informal interactions between scientists are particularly important and hard to realize with traditional communications approaches. We are testing existing packages based on the IETF SIP (session initiation protocol) standard and integrating them into our applications to address these issues. Development of additional tools may be needed to provide better integration and enhanced functionality. By providing a spectrum of tools encompassing instant messaging, voice, video, presence, event notification and application sharing, we hope to overcome technical hurdles and a natural reluctance, among researchers, to interact with colleagues who are not on site. Existing web pages, which support integrated and shared workspaces, such as electronic logbooks, code and experimental run management, records of presentations and publications, personnel databases, and physical site maps will be ‘communications enabled’, so that just as currently there are ‘mailto’ links we will be able to have ‘speak to:’, ‘instant message to:’, ‘video to:’, and ‘share with:’ links. Mechanisms will be provided for session portability; a conference might be moved from a hard phone to a soft phone so that video or application sharing could be enabled. This paper discusses our ongoing efforts in these areas, including a prototype implementation of some of these tools.