Experiment Management with Metadata-based Integration for Collaborative Scientific Research

Scientific research is becoming increasingly relied on collaborative effort among multiple institutions and interdisciplinary consortium, through sharing experiments and data, and joint effort on analysis of data and results. Scientific researchers need not only an effective system to manage their data, results, and the experiments that generate the results, but also a platform to integrate, share and search these across multiple institutions. Therefore, researchers are able to reuse experiments, pool expertise and validate approaches. In this paper, we propose a very general transformation-centric data model to represent and link scientific experiments, and a hierarchical data organization to classify experiments across the consortium. We then propose to manage this based on metadata management, by concisely capturing the context of experiments. Finally, we build SciPort – a collaborative scientific research platform that provides a centralized integration of metadata of scientific experiments and a virtual integration of experiment data. 1