I ahev not been blogging much because in my spare time I was writing an NSF proposal to get some money for Sakai in the name of Cyber infrastructure. Sorry about that. The name of the proposal is: SDCI Data Improvement: Sakai Research Edition – Human Communications as Part of the Scientific Record. This is follow on work to my National Middleware grant where I worked on the Open Grid Computing Environment (www.ogce.org).
The project summary is below. Sorry I involved very few people in the review – I wrote it in a week during the China trip during nights and weekends and on planes.
Now that I am done I can blog more about China.
Also remember that this is a proposal and is not likely to be funded – so don’t start complaining about the deliverables unless the proposal gets funded :).

This proposal will extend the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) so it can be used to capture the communication interactions between cooperating scientists and make those conversations and data part of the long-term scientific record along with the experimental data, intermediate results and published scientific results. There are significant efforts to develop reusable Cyberinfrastructure technology to capture experimental data and metadata and retain that data in long-term digital repositories. Unfortunately, nearly all of the human interaction that currently happens around these scientific activities is done using some ad hoc communication system such as Google Groups or a listserv system. What is needed is a system that rigorously retains as much of the scholarly communication as possible with full metadata and places those discussions, documents, and conversations into the long-term digital repository along side the experimental data. By combining the human communication and experimental data, future scientists will be able to reconstruct both the experimental results and analysis, but also be able to more fully reconstruct the information environment that was used produced the scientific results.
The Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment is already in use by a million users around the world and is used for teaching, learning, research collaboration, and other forms of collaborative work. Sakai is developed using a community of over 100 open source developers from schools and organizations around the world. The non-profit Sakai Foundation coordinates this worldwide activity in order to produce a high quality product with quality equivalent to commercial products in the space and to insure the long-term viability of the Sakai Community.
This project improves several areas of Sakai which are important to research applications: (a) improve the user interface and usability of Sakai to insure that Sakai provides services that are attractive to researchers, (b) build data models so as to product standard interchange formats for material like chat, threaded discussions, e-mail archives, uploaded files, and others, (c) build the capability for this communication data to be easily stored in data repositories alongside the experimental data, and (d) build the ability to use Sakai in a federated-identity environment where researchers can use their institution-provided accounts to interact with many different Sakai systems.
Broader Impact