COLLABORATIVE WORKSPACE OVER SERVICE-ORIENTED GRID SHEN ZHIQI Information Communication Institute of Singapore, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 637665 SHEN HAIFENG, MIAO CHUNYAN School of ComputerEngineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 637665 YANG ZHONGHUA, ROBERT GAY, ZHAO GUOPENG Information Communication In stitute of Singapore, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 637665 Grid computing has evolved dramatically, migrating to service oriented Grids: the third generation Grids. As a result, there has been great interest from both industry and the research community in enabling collaborative service provisioning through operational virtual communities over the grid. However, the existing service providing mechanism of the Grid is too rigid to provide the flexibility for a wide range of collaborative services. Lacking virtual community support at the operation level becomes a major barrier to promoting collaborative services over the Grid environment. In this paper we propose a collaborative workspace over service-oriented grid for developing operationally transparent virtual communities in a wide variety of domains. 1. Introduction Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources distributed across multiple administrative domains based on their (resources) availability, capability, performance, cost, and users’ quality-of-service requirements [1]. Grid computing, since its emergence, has been an active research area for facilitating large-scale collaborative scientific research in many application domains such as geographic study, physical science, Genomics and etc. The initial focus is on the sharing of expensive resources, such as super computational power, storage and rare/expensive facilities. For example, the U.S. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Grid (NEESGrid) connects experimental facilities (e.g., shake tables), data archives, and computers [2]. Nowadays grid computing has