A smart cloud repository for online instrument

Abstract

During The last few decades, remote laboratories have been integrated into education and research in all fields of engineering. Remote access gives users hands on experience with direct control over instruments and devices, and allows them to be accessed 24 hours a day from anywhere. It appears to offer a simple solution to problems of distance, expensive equipment, and limited availability. The concept of remote lab is to make instruments available and ready to use for any kind of situations and experiments over internet. Currently, one of the challenges is how to find the appropriate instrument which responds to user's requirements and constraints in order to conduct a given experiment. The most significant reason of this problem is the lack of information about online instruments that provides potentially interested parties the ability to achieve such a mission. Moreover and till now, it is impossible to use simultaneously, and for the same experiment, instruments that belong to different providers. Thanks to the semantic web technology, a significant step forward can be made in terms of general description model in order to make possible the utilization and cooperation of instruments belonging to different providers. Consequently, we propose in this paper a semantic web technology based model which attempts to solve the mentioned problems.