Archived: 11 July 2007
Published in
Proc. of 5th Australasian Symposium on Grid Computing and e-Research, Bendigo, Jan 2007.
Conferences in Research Practice and
Information Technology, Vol 68, ACSW Frontiers 2007.
© Copyright Australian Computer Society Inc.
An infrastructure for remote instrument access, data acquisition and data management is being developed for e-Research. The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) is being used to provide a scalable and extensible basis for the cyberinfrastructure, and X-ray diffraction is targeted as an ideal development domain. Australian research is enhancing the CIMA model to enable the use of federated Grid storage infrastructure (SRB), and the use of the Kepler workflow system. Kepler has been introduced to enable automated data management, and the facile extraction and generation of instrument and experimental metadata. The system permits experimental data to be deposited into the SRB data store in real time in a schema that allows for searching on the basis of metadata or user supplied annotations, image file previewing and data management and download. The CCLRC scientific metadata model is being adopted for metadata definition. In addition to monitoring, CIMA is being further extended to support instrument control, and is being embedded as a component in a feature rich portal for remote instrument access. The portal utilises AJAX and Pushlet technologies for portlet refresh and updating. An X3D based 3D virtual representation of the instrument provides data collection simulation and (pseudo) real time instrument representation. The system is being further augmented with an embryonic tool for multi-user collaborative data evaluation.