Domain-Specific Groupware Environment for E-research on Chemistry

E-Research aims to facilitate collaboration across time and distance. Researchers need techniques and tools to support their collaborative work. Groupware is one technique that supports groups of people engaging in a common task over the network. Besides, it is also one of the most effective means to solve the collaboration problem. Existing groupware projects provide fixed functions such as messaging, conferencing, electronic meeting, document management, document collaboration and so on. However, they put limited emphasis on scientistspsila research work in their specific fields. This paper proposes a groupware environment, and tries to give a domain-specific group editor to facilitate researcherspsila collaboration. The groupware implements a visual molecule group editor for chemists to co-edit molecular structures over network. And it has a plug-in extensible architecture intending to easily integrate other tools which is useful for chemistspsila collaboration. The idea given in this paper could be a possible solution to facilitate chemistspsila collaborative research work.