Legal Issues Regarding Distributed and High Performance Computing in Geosciences and Exploration

This paper provides a compact insight into legal issues leading to collaboration frameworks for use with Distributed and High Performance Computing resources in the geosciences and exploration disciplines, building integrated public/commercial information system components within the e-Society. Focus is on a new framework for the use of computing resources, interfaces for data and application interchange, based on current developments regarding infonomics systems, case studies within the long-term GEXI project, and Active Source. A suitable framework base has been created over the last years, being used for a number of scenarios in research environments, using High End Computing resources. Application of these methods for commercial service structures affords the consideration of various legal aspects. In collaboration with international partners from geosciences, industry, economy, and education the framework has been found the solution to overcome the legal cooperation barrier. Established on this work, international cooperations are currently built. This paper presents the results of applying the framework, reducing complexity in collaboration management.