ASSISS: an active semi-structured scientific information sharing system

The main concept behind our approach to scientific information sharing is to capture scientific experiments in hypermedia documents as the basic unit of information exchange. We defined SEML (Scientific Experiment Markup Language), based on the XML standard that introduces definitions of tags and links for specific and common information describing scientific experiments. A collection of SEML documents can be viewed as an online electronic experiment logbook that captures the entire experiment. The process and inter-relationships between experiments are modeled to allow an experiment to be re-created, perhaps when input data sets change. We have prototyped ASSISS (Active Semi-Structured Information Sharing System), supporting the browsing, searching and dissemination of XML documents. ASSISS extends scalable active data dissemination technologies developed in the Semantic Multicast Project to provide support for collaborative scientific information dissemination. Within the framework, users´ information requests are adaptively clustered. The aggregated information processing and dissemination needs of user groups are then satisfied by a network of dynamic content agents that filters and transforms information in the appropriate manner. SEML is used as the vocabulary against which user profiles are specified, and SEML documents capturing an experiment can be proactively multicasted to groups of users who are interested in some aspect of the activity as the experiments are being conducted