Managing Soil Science Experiments Using ZOO

Introduction Over the past three years, in collaboration with several domain scientists, we have studied the needs of a wide range of experimental disciplines, developed solutions to some of the basic problems in experiment management, and have made significant progress towards implementing a simple Desktop Experiment Management Environment (DEME) called Zoo. Our work has proceeded in a tight loop between developing generic experiment management technology that is implemented in a generic tool, Zoo, installing customized enhancements of the tool that constitute full systems (complete Customized Desktop Experiment ManagementSystems (CDEMSs)) in laboratories 1 of interest, and using the provided feedback to guide our research directions. The overall Zoo project has been described in the 1996 VLDB Conference [7]. Specific aspects of the project and some of the Zoo mo