Portal Services for Collaborative Remote Instrument Control, Monitoring and Data Access

A two component portal system is being developed for collaborative remote instrument and data control and monitoring. The system builds on and enhances the common instrument middleware architecture (CIMA) model for Web services based monitoring of remote scientific instruments and sensors. The architecture supports remote access to multiple instruments from a single portal. Plugin modules are used to provide flexibility and re-use, and the notion of plugin control is being developed. The use of Web 2.0 Pushlet and AJAX technologies has been introduced for push based portlet refresh and updating. An X3D based 3D virtual representation of the instrument provides data collection simulation and (pseudo) real time instrument representation. An important component of the system is a Webs services driven portlet for collaborative image viewing.