Collaborative Working Environment for Virtual and Remote Experiments in Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies

A society of knowledge requires a mobile, interconnected scientific community: in this paper, we present a concept for a new type of collaborative working environments for knowledge gain and research, focusing on the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Thriving on phenomena, which appear in the atomic scale, nanotechnology is a very promising multi disciplinary field, where physics, chemistry, electrical engineering and many others come into play. Students and scientists in academic environments, and engineers in production lines shall be enabled to act and move in user-centric, intelligent virtual knowledge spaces, accessible through Web Services. NanoSpaces aims at supporting natural forms of scientific and technological cooperations without geographical, technological or application-specific boundaries.