Towards Scientific Dataspaces

Powerful computers and high-speed networks are posing new challenges to scientific data management and are changing the way the scientists use computers today. Meanwhile, scientific communities are typically geographically distributed and the Internet is the main tool used to coordinate scientific research and share data from networked laboratories. The contribution of this paper is the identification and testing of factors important for the success of such Collaborative Scientific Environments (CSEs). We present an analysis of CSEs as virtual organizations whose participants must marshal competencies to manage scientific experiments. Focusing on data integration, we propose a framework that tries to model transparent integration of data and experiments across research institutions. The framework provides a general meta-model to capture the basic aspects of a CSE and a dataspace that models several aspects of data sharing in distributed CSEs.