Fostering national and international collaborations for Arctic Resources using a Virtual Collaboratory

The Arctic has become a key strategic area because of its geopolitical and geoeconomic importance. It is that estimated that Arctic region holds large deposits of oil, natural gas, and large quantities of valuable minerals. Furthermore, with the shrinking of the polar ice cap, new navigation routes are possible to connect North America to Eurasia. These new shorter routes will significantly cut the time and costs of shipping. The Arctic Collaboratory Environment (ACE) project is an international program which brings together groups from nations in the Arctic region enabling broader sharing of resources and producing a system that can serve the region as a whole. The objective of the ACE project is to provide decision support system focused on the changing environment of the Arctic region and to foster collaboration between different national and international agencies.

The ACE system is built using open-source components and utilizes well established interoperability standards to provide a robust architecture for serving curated environmental data. ACE system supports real time/near real time environmental data acquisition and display for situational awareness. A rich internet application client is provided to different user types to exploit these datasets. ACE system stores comprehensive metadata to facilitate search, evaluation and interpretation of these environmental datasets. ACE users can curate and filter datasets that can serve as benchmark datasets for different operational situations. Ancillary information that provide clarity in understanding the situation such as reports, news, social network feeds can be aggregated into the ACE system. One of key ACE system capability is to support both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration. Users can video chat with each other in real time, share screens and even use translation capabilities to collaborate synchronously. Users can collaborate asynchronously with each other by creating online communities and sharing data layers.