Information management for material science applications in a Virtual Laboratory

The goal of Virtual Laboratory project (VL), being developed at the University of Amsterdam, is to provide an open and flexible infrastructure to support scientists in their collaboration towards the achievement of a joint experiment. The advanced features of VL provide an ideal environment for experiment-based applications, such as the Material Analysis of Complex Surfaces (MACS) experiments, to benefit from different developed interfaces to the hardware and software required by the scientists. To properly support the information management in this collaborative environment, a set of innovative and specific mechanisms and functionalities for efficient storage, handling, integration, and retrieval of the MACS-related data, as well as data analysis tools on the experiment results, are being developed. This paper focuses on the information management in the MACS application case and describes its implementation using the Matisse ODBMS system.