CSCoRE: Computer Science Collaborative Research Environment

Abstract

Generally, collaboration is the act of working together to achieve a common goal. Its scope does not only include the idea of working together but also how the participants can work together. With the increasing availability of the Inter- net, companies are enabled to develop cost-e ective collaborative solutions called collaboratories. A collaboratory is a virtual research environment that enables re- searchers based in di erent locations to work together and share their knowledge and facilities, thus enriching and speeding up both national and international research. Today, numerous collaboratories are created for di erent disciplines. However in the eld of Computer Science, the only closest idea we have to collab- oratories is the distributed software development. Though the existing technical infrastructure seems to provide adequate support for distributed software develop- ment, projects are most often undermined by poor software development environ- ments and tools. Not only the diverse set of tools is reported to cause problems but also the di erent versions of a single tool potentially caused problems as well. The Computer Science Collaborative Research Environment (CSCoRE) has been built to address these problems. CSCoRE is a tool for collaborative software development and software project management that is speci cally designed for Computer Science research. It provides a common interface where participants can create and join projects and have a single storage for data and information. Furthermore, CSCoRE enables the members of each project to manage and share data, references, tools and other relevant materials among themselves. Also, the system helps in maintaining current and historical versions of the les of the project with the use of subversion.