Environment for collaborative development and execution of virtual laboratory applications

Abstract

This paper presents the solutions for a user interface environment which have been developed within the ViroLab Virtual Laboratory to enable developers and medical researchers to develop and execute experiments. Experiments require support in form of a script editor easily extendible by a number of additional functions related to the functionality of the Virtual Laboratory, like sharing experiments, and an experiment management mechanism which enables the experiments to be executed with a number of facilities allowing, e.g. tracking the execution, logging errors. Moreover, two user groups, developers and users, need to collaborate to improve experiments and introduce more refinements to the research conducted, which imposes many requirements on the environment which becomes the main collaboration platform for the researchers. The work identifies these requirements in the domain of medical sciences and proposes solutions for efficient and convenient collaboration. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.