Support for Cooperative Experiments in e-Science: From Scientific Work flows to Knowledge Sharing - Identification of Ligand Binding Site and Protein-Protein Interaction Area - page 136

Fig. 7.1 The Material Analysis of Complex Surface (MACS) experiments aim at identifying the
elements that compose complex surfaces such as paintings, biological tissues or polymer laminates.
The MACS lab experiments can be decomposed into three phases: the pre-processing phase for the
extraction of and preparation of samples, the experimentation phase where the sample is processed
using special devices, and the analysis phase where the collected experimental data is analysed by
scientists (Frenkel et al. 2001 )

as a hyper-spectral data cube. A quality control process is carried out to certify that
the generated data complies with certain standards.

The large amount of data produced by these devices makes the analysis phase
longer and more time-consuming than the experiment phase itself. For example, the
size of one single data cube can range from 16 to 100 Mbytes. Up to 20 data cubes
can be generated each day. Thus, a set of analysis tools needs to be integrated into
the application to facilitate the work of the scientists, e.g. correlation analysis, mul-
tivariate data analysis (PCA, pLS) and others.

7.3 Life-Cycle of e-Scienti fi c Experiments

Traditional scientific methodology uses the empirical cycle as a guide for experi-
ments; e-Science is no different, but in its particular incarnation of the empirical
cycle some phases require extra emphasis. When scienti fi c experiments are modeled