Collaborative PL-Science: utilizando elementos de colaboração em uma linha de produtos de software científico

Abstract

The need for collaboration in the scientific field has been discussed in some papers. Its relevance in the context of this thesis is justified by classical problems in this area, such as lack of support for the composition of scientific workflows, difficult reuse to scientific applications, difficulty of cooperation and communication among geographically distributed teams of scientists, among others. Approaches to Software Product Line - SPL have been used to support scientists in the design of scientific workflows. However many relevant information about scientific applications are lost or even not provided by scientists. This paper presents an approach named Collaborative PL-Science, which is an extension of an approach called PL-Science. In the PL-Science approach scientists had only the artifacts persisted in the core of the SPL as components of work. No historical or "rationale" was generated in this environment. Therefore all the knowledge about the functionalities of the artifacts, the experiences of the scientist and the decisions made are attributed to the user. As a proposed solution to these problems, the Collaborative PL-Science uses collaboration elements, such as awareness and context information and a mechanism to support communication in a Scientific Software Product Line - SSPL. Thus, it is expected to generate opportunities for interaction between researchers and contextualize them in their activity of designing scientific workflows.