Overall Concept

Federation of Scientific institutions
BW-eLabs establishes a federation of scientific institutions which are
loosely coupled by a central registry. Establishment of thrust is
technically handled by Shibboleth services running at participating
institutions. The federation allows the mutual booking of experimental
resources, i.e. remotely controlled lab equipment; these resources can
then be used to run measurement series remotely through a remote
desktop access protocol which requires only a browser at the client
side.

Architecture
All participating institutions run a web-server, a booking database
administrating the resources of the institute, and an eSciDoc repository
for storage and archival of measured data. The access to the remote
systems is encrypted, and login is only permitted on successful booking
of resources. Measured data will be automatically collected, will be
enriched with contextual meta-data and will be stored in eSciDoc.

Work-flow and Booking
One of the central services of eSciDoc is granting remote access to
laboratory instruments and equipment; this not only requires modern
equipment that does allow remote-control, but it also requires
changes in the administration of the institution: even though
lab equipment is controlled remotely, BW-eLabs still suggests that
a lab operator monitors the experiment locally and steps in in case
experimental parameters leave their limiting safety regions.

Booking experimental resources in a lab requires providing a concept
sketch of the experiment to be performed; this sketch, to be written
by the remote user, contains not only a description of the experiment to
be performed and the equipment and consumables required, but it also
contains a tentative schedule and a risk analysis. The concept sketch
is then approved by both the operator and the lab management, with
a possible change of the schedule. Remote access to the lab will then
be granted at the time scheduled in the booking.

Data Provenance, Data Management and Embedding into the Publication Process
Starting with the acquired scientific raw data, BW-eLabs supports the
full scientific publication process; this starts at the enrichment of the measured
data with meta-data describing equipment and researcher, the generation
of persistent identifiers to selected data sets to allow citation in
articles up to indexing the articles in repositories of university
libraries. Thus, BW-eLabs creates a continuous flow of the data from
their creation up to its reader, ready for re-use in following research activities.
Thus, researchers are enabled to link raw data to their publication,
and provides a step towards "enhanced publications".

Technical Infrastructure and Portability
Controlling lab equipment remotely over the Internet remains a point
solution, often because equipment interfaces are unique and vendors
rarely provide open and standardized interfaces. A tractable solution
is, however, to provide a remote desktop connection to vendor
software controlling the lab equipment; all common operating systems
provide such a possibility. This remote desktop can then be made
available on the network. The concept of the infrastructure, the
booking system, data provenance and automatic data harvesting in eSciDoc are
portable as well - such services are provided by the
BW-eLabs infrastructure and are independent of the laboratory hardware.