A Methodology for Integrating New Scientific Domains and Applications in a Virtual Laboratory Environment

Abstract

Emergence of advanced complex experiments in experimental sciences resulted in a change in the way of experimentation. Several solutions have been proposed to support scientists with their complex experimentations, ranging from simple data portals to virtual laboratories. These solutions offer a variety of facilities to scientists, such as management of experiments and experiment-related information, and management of resources. However, issues related to adding new types of experiments to proposed support environments still remain untouched, causing inefficient utilization of efforts and inadequate transfer of expertise. The main topic of this paper is to present a methodology for integrating new scientific domains and applications in a multidisciplinary virtual laboratory environment. In order to complement the methodology with the right context, the paper also presents an experiment model that uniformly represents scientific experiments, data models for modelling experiment-related information, and mechanisms for the management of this information.