Applying Enterprise Models to Design Cooperative Scientific Environments

Scientific experiments are supported by activities that create, use, communicate and distribute information whose organizational dynamics is similar to processes performed by distributed cooperative enterprise units. On this premise, the aim of this paper is to apply existing enterprise models and processes for designing cooperative scientific experiments. The presented approach assumes the Service Oriented Architecture as the enacting paradigm to formalize experiments as cooperative services on various computational nodes of a network. Specifically, a framework is proposed that defines the responsibility of e-nodes in offering services, and the set of rules under which each service can be accessed by e-nodes through service invocation. By discussing a representative case study, the paper details how specific classes of experiments can be mapped into a service-oriented model whose implementation is carried out in a prototypical scientific environment.