gCube social facilities: notification system

The social networking facilities manifest in a number of applications made available through a web browser. These facilities are conceptually close to the common facilities promoted by social networks - e.g., posting news, commenting on posted news - yet adapted to deal with large scale collaboration and cooperation on comprehensive scientific products, data sets, theories and tools. The Notification System alerts users on an as-it-happens basis. These notifications offer a sense of anticipation and create a productivity boost. Users receive an alert (through a priori selected channels, e.g., email, web portal) notifying them when something of interest has happened in their Virtual Research Environments VRE(s). For instance, VRE members will receive notifications when a complex and time consuming experiment is completed and its results are available, or a task of a collaborative work-flow is completed by all the planned participants, or another user mentioned a research product within an ongoing discussion and other similar scenarios.