An infrastructure for remote instrument access, data acquisition and data management is being developed for e-Research. The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) is being used to provide a scalable and extensible basis for the cyberinfrastructure, and X-ray diffraction is targeted as an ideal development domain. Australian research is enhancing the CIMA model to enable federated Grid storage via SRB, and the use of the Kepler workflow system. Kepler has been introduced to enable automated data management, and the facile extraction and generation of instrument and experimental metadata. The system permits real-time deposition of experimental data into an SRB data store using a schema that allows for searching on the basis of metadata or user supplied annotations, image file previewing and data management and download. The CCLRC scientific metadata model is being adopted for metadata definition. In addition to monitoring, CIMA is being further extended to support instrument c...
Ian M. Atkinson, Douglas du Boulay, Clinton Chee,