Executive Summary:

The research and development activities play a vital role in the industrial and economic development of a country. The research activities are knowledge-oriented, where knowledge is encapsulated in the form of data. The data is the hub of research, as most of the research activities rover around data, which is created, processed, shared and stored during and after the field and laboratory experiments. In other words, data management and sharing plays a key role in research irrespective of the type, size and method of research. In the present scenario, scientists are involved in research and development collaborations, which span among multiple organizations. They perform variety of field and laboratory experiments and share the research data with the research team during and after the scientific experiments to obtain the results through data analysis techniques. For that the scientists rely on a variety of software tools for data storage, sharing, analysis and presentation tasks. The problem is that in current setup, scientists are not able to share the research data properly to convey timely research results to other research fellows due to unavailability of sufficient technical ICT infrastructure in the research organizations. They don’t have network-based integrated software platform for real-time sharing of data, software tools, computing power and memory, which are the prime components of an organization’s digital assets required for research activities. Alternatively, they have to rely on conventional approaches which are slow, unreliable, insecure, and unusable. Such approaches confine the scientists within the organizational perimeters and do not allow them access research data in collaboration.

The proposed ResColLab platform is based on cloud technology used for allowing the scientific organizations to share the data in a collaborative environment. The main idea of ResColLab is to create virtual organizations (VOs) scattered among the existing (administrative) organizations. The VOs are used to share a variety of resources such as data, computation capabilities, storage media and software applications. The cloud computing technology is extensively used these days for collaboration of projects. Specifically in research, there are many projects which are using cloud platforms for research collaboration such as CloudRB, GIFT- Cloud, RP-SMARF, and Cloudscape VII. The scientific and industrial organizations are using these platforms to harness the research collaboration. ResColLab will provide a platform to the scientists of Pakistan to establish scientific collaboration and sharing of digital resources among the researchers. ResColLab will be the pioneer of such platform in the direction of R&D ventures contributing to R&D ventures.

Objectives:

1. Capacity building of scientific organizations for developing research collaborations through ICT-enabled technologies

2. Identify the data and resource sharing requirements in scientific collaborations in different research domains

3. Investigate complexities in hardware, network and software tools, applications and technologies used for research

4. Identify the Security, Privacy and Reliability requirements of security-critical research data to prevent unauthorized disclosure and misuse of research data to build a trustable collaboration culture among researcher organizations

5. Develop a cloud-based platform for research project collaboration for sustainable development of research organizations

6. Create an active link among ICT industry and academia for technological development of long-term research collaboration

7. Create awareness among the researchers to motivate them for using ICT tools/platforms for advancement of research activities

8. Develop an industry-strength collaboration platform using agile methodology by including regular feedback from the researchers

9. Develop a simple, user-friendly, web-based, and easy to self-learn user interface for researchers to encourage the researchers use the ICT platform without complexities

10. Increase the business opportunities for industry by introducing to them a large clientele base in research organizations and HEIs

11. Create job opportunities for IT/business graduates with an innovative solution having huge potential for development, customization, marketing, sale and service related jobs

ResColLab: Scientific Data Sharing in Research Collaboration