[CAnet - news] Putting Laboratories on Line with Web Services

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[Excellent article in IEEE Computing about using web service for control and
management of remote instruments. Combined with UCLP and web service
workflow this provide students and researchers a "LabView" capability to
link various remote instruments and servers together into a distributed
virtual laboratory.  Thanks to Mike Hrybyk for this pointer. Some excerpts
-- BSA]


Putting Labs Online with Web Services
March/April 2006 (Vol. 8, No. 2)    pp. 27-34

Yuhong Yan, University of New Brunswick
Yong Liang, University of New Brunswick
Xinge Du, University of New Brunswick
Hamadou Saliah-Hassane, Université du Québec à Montré al
Ali Ghorbani, University of New Brunswick


DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MITP.2006.45

Abstract
Web services provide a way to offer remote control of scattered scientific
instruments, enabling online labs that students can use from anywhere, at
any time.

In science and engineering education, experimentation plays a crucial role.
The classicuniversity science course entails lecture and lab: students’
active participation in experiments enhances their understanding of the
principles described in the lectures. However, not every educational
institution can afford all the experimental equipment it would like.
Moreover,colleges and universities increasingly offer distance-learning
programs, allowing students to attend lectures and seminars and complete
coursework using the Internet. In situations such as these, access to online
laboratories or experiment systems can greatly enhance student learning—
increasing the range of experiments available at an institution and giving
the distance learners hands-on, real-time experience.

Online laboratories,however,are not as mature as online courses. Current
online experiment systems fall into two categories: virtual laboratories
provide a simulation environment in which students conduct experiments;
remote laboratories, our focus in this article, let students use a GUI
to operate actual instruments via remote control.

The difficulty with creating an effective laboratory operated by remote
control is making scattered computational resources and instruments
operable across platforms. Existing online experiment systems commonly use a
classic client-sever architecture and off-the-shelf middleware for
communication.

Normally, to ensure interoperability, these systems rely on instruments from
a single company—such as National Instruments or Agilent—and Microsoft
Windows as the common operating system. Users must then install additional
software to operatethe remote instruments. For a student using an
old laptop or the computer at a public library, this could be difficult. So,
online labs configured this way can’t achieve the ultimate goals of sharing
heterogeneous resources among online laboratories and easy access via the
Web.

Our solution to these shortcomings is to base online experiment systems on
Web services,which are designed to support interoperable, machine to-
machine interaction over a network and can also integrate heterogeneous
resources.We have devised a service-oriented architecture for online
experiment systems, enabled by Web service protocols, and a methodology for
wrapping the operations of the instruments into Web services.
....


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