Communication and sharing of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of all scientific endeavors. Though we have at our disposal an ever growing number of communication technologies (e.g., discussion boards, weblogs, chat, instant messaging), scientific analysis and visualization tools have not kept pace with these developments. In this paper we explore two important communication related aspects of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) - weblog publishing and real-time, multi-user collaboration.

Weblogs, a form of online journal or diary, are an increasingly popular mechanism for communication and knowledge management. The IDV provides a facility to easily publish scientific related content (images, movies, application state, etc.) to a number of different weblog services. This facility can act as a field project journal, a classroom lab book or an ad-hoc knowledge capture tool.

The real-time collaboration facility provides for the sharing of all IDV application state among a group of users. Coupled with remote data servers, multiple users can load in new datasets, create and graphically annotate displays, and engage in text chat. These sessions can be captured and replayed, allowing for the creation of rich training and educational materials. This facility can be used in a variety of ways, one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many, supporting both ad-hoc and formal collaboration in classroom, laboratory and field settings.

We will provide an overview of the various collaborative aspects of the IDV and describe current and future uses of these facilities.