An interdisciplinary virtual laboratory on nanoscience

Nanoscience is a booming field with manifold applications. Nanoscience equipment (e.g., microscopes) are however expensive and only major companies and organizations sponsored by research programs can afford on-site installation. Based on the Internet as a global communication platform, distance education and remote usage might offer a working environment by which complex and sensitive instruments can be shared. The Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC) project NANO-WORLD has exactly the following goal: establish a Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory to be shared and used by a distributed user community. Three main topics need to be realized in the framework of a virtual laboratory: user management, communication and co-operation, and the control of virtual experiments. The basic architecture of the prototype is a multi-tiered client-server model which supports individual nanoscience experiments to be implemented as a stand-alone web-service. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.