g-Social: Enhancing integrated e-science tools with Social Networking functionality

During the last decade, the scientific community has witnessed an unprecedented deployment of large-scale, federated e-Infrastructures such as Grid Computing, primarily for supporting data-intensive scientific exploration and coordinated problem solving. However, practical experience and user studies have indicated that the adoption of such e-Infrastructures is lagging behind original expectations, a fact which is mainly attributed to the limited support that available tools provide for user collaboration and information sharing. The goal of this paper is twofold, first to lay down the foundations for building a collaboration environment in the form of abstractions and second to show the effectiveness of these abstractions through g-Social, an Eclipse-based, open-source environment as an extension to g-Eclipse, that provides a powerful, user-friendly, platform-independent toolset for users, application developers and administrators of Grid infrastructures. g-Social enables user collaboration and resource sharing through Online Social Networking services, capitalizing on the success that these services have.