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Chapter XXVI
Semantic Integration for
Research Environments
Tomasz Gubala
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands & ACC CYFRONET AGH, Poland
Marian Bubak
Institute of Computer Science AGH, Poland & University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Peter M.A. Sloot
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
AbstrAct
Research environments for modern, cross-disciplinary scientifc endeavors have to unite multiple us-
ers, with varying levels of expertise and roles, along with multitudes of data sources and processing
units. The high level of required integration contrasts with the loosely-coupled nature of environments
which are appropriate for research. The problem is to support integration of dynamic service-based
infrastructures with data sources, tools and users in a way that conserves ubiquity, extensibility and us-
ability. This chapter presents a close examination of related achievements in the feld and the description
of proposed approach. It shows that integration of loosely-coupled system components with formally-
defned vocabularies may fulfll the listed requirements. The authors demonstrate that combining formal
representations of domain knowledge with techniques like data integration, semantic annotations and
shared vocabularies, enables the development of systems for modern e-Science. For demonstration they
present how several semantically-augmented experiments are modeled in the ViroLab virtual laboratory
for virology.