Web Metalaboratory: Composition of Laboratories on the Web

The amount of scientific data, services and on-line tools available on the Web offers an unprecedented opportunity to conceive new kinds of laboratories able to blend these resources. Existing experimental and collected data can substantiate asynchronous laboratories. Combined with mashup enabled software, it is possible to produce hybrid laboratories to confront, for example, synthetic simulations with observations. This work addresses this opportunity in the Education context through our metalaboratory, an authoring tool to produce laboratories by combining building blocks encapsulated in components. It introduces lab composition patterns and active Web templates as fundamental mechanisms to support a lab authoring task. Laboratories can be embedded and "mashed-up" in Web documents. The paper shows practical experiments of producing Web virtual and hybrid laboratories.