Beyond the Document Library: Portal-Based Browsing and Exploration of Community Data Clouds

Every modern portal ships with some form of internal document library portlet tools that can be used to enable groups to share files. Unfortunately, certain limitations -- that the portlet can only view data managed directly by the portal and that document and data files are the only resource that can be browsed -- make these tools less valuable in many real-world collaborations. This paper describes a semantically-enhanced scientific resource library portlet that extends the traditional document library to enable interaction with multiple distributed repositories in the cloud and to broaden the set of resources that can be viewed beyond simple hierarchical document folder-files structure to include people, sensors, data streams and other complex digital entities and their relationships. Our technology is based on semantic content abstraction and context aggregation functionality supported by Tupelo, a semantic content middleware and is implemented as a portlet plugin to the Liferay-based CyberCollaboratory portal. We describe the architecture components and the browsing features currently implemented and present a water science use case in which users are able to share documents, raw sensor data streams, and derived virtual sensor data (rainfall) from distributed sources within the same semantic resource library.