Accessing remote instrumentation worldwide is one of the goals of e-Science. The task of enabling the execution of complex experiments that involve the use of distributed scientific instruments must be supported by a number of different architectural domains, which inter-work in a coordinated fashion to provide the necessary functionality. These domains embrace the physical instruments, the communication networks interconnecting the distributed systems, the service oriented abstractions and their middleware. Indeed, high-speed networking allows supporting sophisticated, bandwidth-demanding applications to an unprecedented level. However, the transport and access networks are not the only components that enable such applications. An equally important role is played by the distributed system middleware enabling Grids and cloud computing for data intensive applications.
Physical instrumentation lies at the bottom of these environments, but in many cases it represents the primary source of data that may need to be moved across networks and processed by distributed systems. It would be very helpful to deal with instruments that appear just as manageable resources like storage and computing systems. There have been and there are many attempts and progresses in this sense. However, given the large amount of different instruments and their application domains, understanding the common requirements, the user needs, the adaptation and convergence layers (among other aspects), is not a straightforward task. This is the objective of Remote Instrumentation Services (RIS), and this book, along with its predecessors in the same collection, tries to address some of the most relevant related aspects.
Involving user communities in this process is very important, as the diffusion and adoption of a specific service ultimately depends on the favor of the users it is addressed to. Quite a few software developments have failed to reach widespread diffusion among scientific users (just to cite a category), because of the lack of friendliness and easiness of use in dealing with the specific problems of a particular application domain. This aspect has been recognized in many ongoing projects and development efforts. In the European scenario, the DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) project, within which many contributors of this book operate, has focused its activity around the needs of the different user communities, directly involved in the project.