Semantic middleware for e-Science knowledge spaces

The Tupelo semantic content management middleware implements Knowledge Spaces that enable scientists to integrate information into a comprehensive research record as they work with existing tools and domain-specific applications. Knowledge Spaces combine approaches that have demonstrated success in automating parts of this integration activity, including content management systems for domain-neutral management of data, workflow technologies for management of computation and analysis, and semantic web technologies for extensible, portable, citable management of descriptive information and other metadata. Tupelo's 'Context' facility and its associated semantic operations both allow existing data representations and tools to be plugged in, and also provide a semantic 'glue' of important associative relationships that span the research record, such as provenance, social networks, and annotation. Tupelo has enabled the recent work creating e-Science cyberenvironments to serve distributed, active scientific communities, allowing researchers to develop, coordinate and share datasets, documents, and computational models, while preserving process documentation and other contextual information needed to produce an integrated research record suitable for distribution and archiving.