Managing Soil Science Experiments Using ZOO

Over the past three years, in collaboration with several domain scientists, we have studied the needs of a wide range of experimental disciplines, developed solutions to some of the basic problems in experiment management, and have made significant progress towards implementing a simple Desktop Experiment Management Environment (DEME) called Zoo. Our work has proceeded in a tight loop between developing generic experiment management technology that is implemented in a generic tool, Zoo, installing customized enhancements of the tool that constitute full systems (complete Customized Desktop Experiment ManagementSystems (CDEMSs)) in laboratories of interest, and using the provided feedback to guide our research directions. The overall Zoo project has been described in the 1996 VLDB Conference [7]. Specific aspects of the project and some of the Zoo modules have also been discussed elsewhere: the role of schemas in Zoo [5], the theoretical framework used for schema visualization [2] and the resulting prototype schema manager [3, 6], the data model and query language [8], and the object-to-file translator [1]. In this short paper, we first outline the overall architecture of Zoo