Technical Approach and Plan

The fundamental goal of LabSpace is to promote and enhance open-ended networked collaboration among scientists and researchers. LabSpace consists of

• A powerful and intuitive virtual environment, which creates a permanent electronic laboratory on the network, allowing one to interact with other people and with objects in natural ways.
• Navigation and browsing tools, which help one to locate collaborative resources on the Internet.
• High-capacity data archiving mechanisms, which record and index significant events in the history of a collaboration.
• Interfaces to the advanced scientific instruments, which are the focus of much interaction.
• Modules that take advantage of the capabilities of modern workstations, utilizing audio, video, or any other interaction tool necessary to support collaboration.
• A scalable and flexible interface to the networks of today and tomorrow.

The following subsections discuss each of these in detail.

• Persistent Electronic Laboratories
  • An Interaction Metaphor
  • The Elab Server
  • The User Interface
  • Information Location
• The Module Layer
  • The Broker
  • Data Streams
  • Receptors
  • Generators
  • Filters
  • Playback Engines
  • Module Layer Summary
• The Communication Layer
• Scalability Issues
• Technical Summary
• Milestones and Deliverables