Towards a Social Cloud Framework for Collaborative eResearch

Abstract

Collaboration has always been an important aspect of scientific research. The coming of internet opened the doors for greater levels of collaboration for the research community, first enabled by email and then by web 2.0 based online portals called VREs. A new force, social networks, are bringing a paradigm shift to online research communities. Social networks could foster a more vibrant research environment powered by social activities such as sharing, community creation, tagging and community groups. This thesis explores the idea of using the power of social networks to create a social cloud to contribute and share computing resources. The prototype implementation, called the Social Collaborative Cloud (SoCC), uses facebook as the underlying social network. The prototype was evaluated using simulations of both real and synthetic datasets, as well as real world tests.