Collaboration Spheres: a Visual Metaphor to Share and Reuse Research Objects
This addresses the problem of RO discovery and reuse for researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing RO concepts with a new interface.
The paper tackles the difficulty of finding and reusing Research Objects (ROs) by introducing CollabSpheres, a user interface with a visual metaphor and recommendation system, which experimental evaluation shows users perceive as highly usable, satisfying, useful, and easy to use.
Research Objects (ROs) are semantically enhanced aggregations of resources associated to scientific experiments, such as data, provenance of these data, the scientific workflow used to run the experiment, intermediate results, logs and the interpretation of the results. As the number of ROs increases, it is becoming difficult to find ROs to be used, reused or re-purposed. New search and retrieval techniques are required to find the most appropriate ROs for a given researcher, paying attention to provide an intuitive user interface. In this paper we show CollabSpheres, a user interface that provides a new visual metaphor to find ROs by means of a recommendation system that takes advantage of the social aspects of ROs. The experimental evaluation of this tool shows that users perceive high values of usability, user satisfaction, usefulness and ease of use. From the analysis of these results we argue that users perceive the simplicity, intuitiveness and cleanness of this tool, as well as this tool increases collaboration and reuse of research objects.