The initial idea for a science gateway is often driven by requirements in
research and/or teaching. The knowledge about implementing an extensible,
scalable, easy-to-use and sustainable science gateway is not necessarily in
the knowledge portfolio of the researcher behind the idea though. On the
developing side, someone knowledgeable in creating science gateways is not
necessarily an expert in the research area serviced by an envisioned
science gateway. The close collaboration between researchers and science
gateway creators is crucial to gather all necessary information and
requirements on a science gateway. This is usually an underestimated design
task and the exact layout for the science gateway is a continuous and
iterative process with suggestions from developers for the layout and
feedback and comments from the user community. While each community and its
requirements on a science gateway are unique, the questions, which need to
be answered for planning and designing a specific science gateway are very
similar the same independent of the domain. The panel will discuss
effective checklists to support developers to communicate with diverse
domain experts. Such checklists can be the basis to create a good start for
a Software Requirement Specification for an envisioned science gateway.
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Sandra Gesing
Associate Research Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Computational Scientist, Center for Research Computing
University of Notre Dame
http://www3.nd.edu/~sgesing
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