Developing CIMA based cyberinfrastructure for remote access to scientific instruments and collaborative e-research

An infrastructure for remote instrument access, data acquisition and data management is being developed for e-Research. The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) is being used to provide a scalable and extensible basis for the cyberinfrastructure, and X-ray diffraction is targeted as an ideal development domain. Australian research is enhancing the CIMA model to enable federated Grid storage via SRB, and the use of the Kepler workflow system. Kepler has been introduced to enable automated data management, and the facile extraction and generation of instrument and experimental metadata. The system permits real-time deposition of experimental data into an SRB data store using a schema that allows for searching on the basis of metadata or user supplied annotations, image file previewing and data management and download. The CCLRC scientific metadata model is being adopted for metadata definition. In addition to monitoring, CIMA is being further extended to support instrument control, and is being embedded as a component in a feature rich portal for remote instrument access. The architecture supports remote access to multiple instruments from a single portal. The use of 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. A tool for multi-user collaborative image evaluation is being developed for the infrastructure system