Poster by: Peter Turner, Douglas du Boulay & Romain Quilici, School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney; Sandor Brockhauser, European Molecular Biology Laboratory at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, France.

Remote access services can extend the scientific reach and research yield of instruments at both conventional and major facilities, and provide enhanced returns on these significant infrastructure investments. To this end we are developing a portal system that builds on the Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) model for Web services driven remote instrument access middleware. A remote resource access system built on Web services offers a flexible and secure means of integrating multiple functions and applications, regardless
of location, in a way that is difficult or impossible to achieve using the remote-desktop approach exemplified by VNC or NX. Web services are language, platform and location agnostic, provide a scalable basis for a service oriented architecture based system, and are conducive for collaborative remote access user interactions.

A remote access system built on web services offers a flexible means of integrating multiple functions and applications, regardless of location, in a way that is difficult or impossible to achieve using the traditional remotedesktop approach.

Remote control of a complex scientific instrument demands rapid feedback to the user of the status of the instrument. To this end, we are harnessing Web 2.0 technologies, notably AJAX and Pushlets2, together with a virtual instrument model in developing a dynamic and responsive browser interface to a feature rich Web services portal system for remote instrument control and monitoring. An X3D3 based virtual instrument is introduced both for data collection simulation and as at least a partial solution to the ‘dark laboratory’ problem. A virtual model of the machine offers several important benefits for remote access:
• low-bandwidth, interactive and immediately interpretable view of the current state of the instrument, that offsets the ‘dark lab’ problem arising when lighting is switched off or a web-cam fails. The virtual model can be inspected from all angles and distances, and so provides flexibility not possible with a web-cam.
• A means of assessing an experimental strategy and, provided sufficient information has been gathered, simulating that experiment. The model also provides a means of safely testing new remote access services.
• A safe means of automatically determining a collision map for the ‘collidable’ components of the instrument.
• Importantly, a virtual instrument provides a safe means of training users, without risking real instrument or human injury.

The ISO standard X3D virtual modelling XML format is being used to develop the virtual instrument models.