Managing soil science experiments using Zoo (http://www.cs.wisc.edu//spl sim/ZOO)

We have studied the needs of a wide range of experimental disciplines, developed solutions to some of the basic problems in experiment management and 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, installing customized enhancements of the tool that constitute full systems [complete customized desktop experiment management systems (CDEMSs)] in laboratories of interest, and using the provided feedback to guide our research directions. In this paper, we first outline the overall architecture of Zoo and then discuss a particular experiment.