A virtual laboratory for web and grid enabled scientific experiments

Interactions and organization models tend to be more and more oriented to flexibility, heterogeneity and collaboration in the style of Virtual Organizations. This paper is framed in the context of e-science and presents an approach to the definition and execution of distributed scientific experiments as a pool of services executed on collaborating sites at different heterogeneous organizations. The focus is on flexibility, reuse, orchestration and interoperability of services within a cooperation process. It is discussed how the workflow of the experiment can be specified by actors with low information technology, but high domain, knowledge and how an agent-based framework can enhance the flexibility of experiment execution. Examples are given in the bioinformatics context. A prototype environment is described.