Portal-based knowledge environment for collaborative science

The Knowledge Environment for Collaborative Science (KnECS) is an open-source informatics toolkit designed to enable knowledge Grids that interconnect science communities, unique facilities, data, and tools. KnECS features a Web portal with team and data collaboration tools, lightweight federation of data, provenance tracking, and multi-level support for application integration. We identify the capabilities of KnECS and discuss extensions from the Collaboratory for Multi-Scale Chemical Sciences (CMCS) which enable diverse combustion science communities to create and share verified, documented data sets and reference data, thereby demonstrating new methods of community interaction and data interoperability required by systems science approaches. Finally, we summarize the challenges we encountered and foresee for knowledge environments. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.