Performing measurement tasks and experiments on complex tele-laboratory
structures is gaining momentum as a relevant aspect in a number of areas, from
scientific and technological research, to environmental monitoring, to distance
learning and training. The diffusion of e-Science requires real-time interaction
of researchers’ teams worldwide; this, in turn, relies on a number of functionalities,
which include, among others, the widespread use of collaborative tools
and the possibility to access and control remote instrumentation.
The Grid architecture (or, more generally, the service-oriented architecture,
SOA), viewed as a tool for the integration of distributed resources, plays a significant
role, not only as manager of computational resources, but increasingly
as aggregator of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data
acquisition platforms (e.g., sensor networks). In this context, the functionality
of a service-oriented architecture allows managing, maintaining, and exploiting
heterogeneous and geographically sparse instrumentation and acquisition
devices in a unified way, by providing standardized interfaces and common
working environments to their users. This is achieved through the properties
of isolation from the physical network and from the peculiarities of the instrumentation,
granted by standard middleware, together with secure and flexible
mechanisms to seek, access, and aggregate distributed resources.