e-Science and large facilities

Simon Lambert¹

¹ e-Science Centre, Science and Technology Facilities Council,
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus,
Didcot OX11 0QX, UK
e-mail: S.C.Lambert@rl.ac.uk

The Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK operates a number of world-class scientific facilities. It therefore offers a particularly challenging environment for Current Research Information Systems. In the context of the research life cycle, the special characteristics and needs arising from large facilities will be discussed, leading to the requirements for an integrated e-infrastructure. Of course one of the important elements of such an infrastructure is the acquisition, storage and curation of data from large numbers of experiments that take place on the facilities. At the heart of the e-infrastructure at STFC is a scientific metadata model, representing such aspects as instruments used, provenance, conditions of use, organisation of the datasets themselves, etc. The model and the Data Portal system built on it will be described, along with future challenges.