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R. Mayer, T. Miksa, A. Rauber:
"Ontologies for Describing the Context of Scientific Experiment Processes";
Talk: International Conference on e-Science, Guarujá, SP, Brazil; 2014-10-20 - 2014-10-24; in: "Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on e-Science", (2014).

The re-usability and repeatability of e-Science experiments
is widely understood as a requirement of validating and
reusing previous work in data-intensive domains. Experiments
are, however, often complex chains of processing, involving a
number of data sources, computing infrastructure, software tools,
or external and third-party services, rendering repeatability a
challenging task. Another important aspect of many experiments
is in the social and organisational dimension - very often,
knowledge on how experiments are performed is tacit and
remains with the researcher, and the collaborative and distributed
aspects especially of larger collaborative experiments adds to this
challenge. Therefore, a number of approaches have tackled this
issue from various angles - initiatives for data sharing, code
versioning and publishing as open source, the use of workflow
engines to formalise the steps taken in an experiment, to ways
to describe the complex environment an experiment is executed
in, e.g. via Research Objects. In this paper, we present a model
that has a specific focus on the technical infrastructure that is the
basis of the research experiment. We demonstrate how this model
can be applied to describe e-Science experiments, and align and
compare it to Research Objects.

The re-usability and repeatability of e-Science experiments
is widely understood as a requirement of validating and
reusing previous work in data-intensive domains. Experiments
are, however, often complex chains of processing, involving a
number of data sources, computing infrastructure, software tools,
or external and third-party services, rendering repeatability a
challenging task. Another important aspect of many experiments
is in the social and organisational dimension - very often,
knowledge on how experiments are performed is tacit and
remains with the researcher, and the collaborative and distributed
aspects especially of larger collaborative experiments adds to this
challenge. Therefore, a number of approaches have tackled this
issue from various angles - initiatives for data sharing, code
versioning and publishing as open source, the use of workflow
engines to formalise the steps taken in an experiment, to ways
to describe the complex environment an experiment is executed
in, e.g. via Research Objects. In this paper, we present a model
that has a specific focus on the technical infrastructure that is the
basis of the research experiment. We demonstrate how this model
can be applied to describe e-Science experiments, and align and
compare it to Research Objects.