The Future of Portals in E-Science

Scientific experiments are executed through activities that create, use, communicate and distribute information whose organizational dynamics are similar to processes performed by distributed cooperative enterprise units. On this premise, the aim of this article is to discuss how a portal-based approach can support the design and management of cooperative scientific experiments executed with a strong information and communication technologies (ICT) support and in a distributed manner, hence named e-experiments. The approach assumes the Web, Web services and the grid as the enacting paradigm for formalizing e-experiments as cooperative services on various computational nodes of a network. A framework is proposed that defines the responsibility of actors of the e-experiment and of the e-nodes in offering services, as well as the portal architecture through which the e-experiment resources can be accessed. By discussing a case study in the field of bioinformatics, the article shows how an e-experiment can be planned and executed starting from a set of Web services inserted in a portal and invoked upon the possibly underlying grid structure.