Enhancing the support for scientific work and innovation activities,
which is
the goal of e-Science, is a multifaceted and challenging task that goes far
beyond the provision of Grid infrastructures. Next generation e-Science
support aims to provide a more comprehensive coverage of the scientific
innovation process and to open up the benefits of e-science to a wider
range of scientific domains.
The aim of the presentation is to present the Fraunhofer vision for
the architecture and the advanced services of its planned knowledge-based
e-science infrastructure. The implementation of such an infrastructure may
profit from the exploitation of existing technologies in the area of
information and knowledge technologies and distributed infrastructures,
but also requires the development of innovative services.
In order to implement the Fraunhofer e-Science vision we are using a
layered architecture as depicted in the figure below. The lowest layer
is the Resource Network Infrastructure. The aim of this layer is to
provide access in a standardized way to the different resources like
digital libraries, computation services or storage capacities. The generic
Information Middleware handles the different types of innovation resources
in a unified way as far as possible. The Domain Specific Added Value
Services compose and enhance the information middleware services in order
to provide domain specific extensions. The fourth layer provides the
interface for the user that allows the access to the services of the
lower layers. The user interfaces are typically domain specific but
eneric components are possible. |