Remote Experiments as SemanticWeb Services

Online experimentation allows users to operate remote instruments from anywhere and, usually, at any time. The amount of experiments that can be accessed trough the Web is growing quickly. These remote experiments have distinct characteristics, need a variety of resources, as well as present different availability and access procedures. Remote experiments can be supported as Semantic Web Services, demanding special attention in terms of discovering, selection, composition, scheduling, monitoring and making available the results. In order to allow the integration of remote experiments in Web-based environments, we propose supporting remote experiments as semantic Web services. Our approach, which we call RALOWS - remote access laboratory ontology and Web service, reuse and extend known ontologies to provide formal description for experiments. More specifically, we combine temporal concepts to service and resource descriptions so as to make possible to specify scheduling and to impose restrictions in the use of the resources involved in the experimentation.