Identity and Functionality in the Common Instrument Middleware Architecture
Donald F. McMullen, Thomas Reichherzer · 2006
Abstract. The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) is middlewarefor integrating scientific instruments, individual sensor s or actuators, and sensor net-works into computing and storage grids. A key element of the design of CIMA isthe representation of the identity and functionality of network accessible instrumentsand sensors. This paper presents the approach used in CIMA to represent instrumentsand sensors and how these representations are used by applications to build functionalmodels of CIMA-enabled instruments and sensors. One potential outcome of this workis the development of a “Semantic Web” for instruments, allo wing users from all seg-ments of society to find and use instruments, sensors and othe r real-time data sourcesthat can answer critical questions about the real world. 1 IntroductionScientific researchers by and large consider experimental o r observed data to be the raw ma-terial from which knowledge is extracted through a process that might involve reduction,fusion, and analysis. This approach on data per se focuses on the latter part of the chain inthe reduction and analysis phases that are performed “off-line” with respect to the instrumentthat collected the data and ignores possible interactions between the analyst and the instru-ment itself. Large-scale projects organized around instruments such as detectors at the LargeHadron Collider or aggregations of weather data for severe weather prediction have yieldeduseful application test beds, but ones that focus on data as separate from the instrument thatproduced them and at a time after their acquisition. For many major instrument facilities thatprovide advanced, complex or even experimental observational hardware, researchers withthe expertise to judge the quality of appropriateness of the data may not have access to theproper tools to perform this analysis until well after the data has been collected, and not atcritical initial stages of the experiment when adjustments or corrections to the hardware canmake a difference in the outcome. This focus on data as separate from its source and theoperations necessary to control instruments remotely in real-time in order to generate, ac-quire and filter data, combined with improved prospects for m aking instruments and sensorsnetwork-accessible has left a gap in capabilities for e-Research.A potential solution to this gap and enabler for on-line real-time access to instruments andsensors is a standard methodology for specifying and developing interfaces that existing andfuture instruments can provide and that data acquisition and reduction applications can relyon. To this end we have been developing the Common Instrument Middleware Architecture(CIMA) [Devadithya et al., 2005], a Web Services based approach to making instruments