Title: Collaboration Spheres: a Visual Metaphor to Share and Reuse Research Objects,
Abstract: Research Objects (ROs) are semantically enhanced aggregations of resources
associated to scientific experiments, such as data, provenance of these data,
the scientific workflow used to run the experiment, intermediate results, logs
and the interpretation of the results. As the number of ROs increases, it is
becoming difficult to find ROs to be used, reused or re-purposed. New search
and retrieval techniques are required to find the most appropriate ROs for a
given researcher, paying attention to provide an intuitive user interface. In
this paper we show CollabSpheres, a user interface that provides a new visual
metaphor to find ROs by means of a recommendation system that takes advantage
of the social aspects of ROs. The experimental evaluation of this tool shows
that users perceive high values of usability, user satisfaction, usefulness and
ease of use. From the analysis of these results we argue that users perceive
the simplicity, intuitiveness and cleanness of this tool, as well as this tool
increases collaboration and reuse of research objects.