Brining together high-tech laboratories and e-Learning infrastructures

Most of today’s collaborative systems are designed as a single, monolithic application. Although there are rare approaches to implement cross-functional architectures, these approaches lack in terms of taking high-tech laboratories into consideration. We understand high-tech laboratories as a kind of knowledge source and have identified an increasing demand for integrating these labs into university-wide e-learning infrastructures. A major challenge are proprietary and manufacturer-specific interfaces of laboratories’ equipment. Therefore this article presents a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for a thermal-shock laboratory to close the gap between knowledge creation and knowledge usage. In this respect digital libraries figure a key role as a place for archiving, structuring documents (e.g. test results), and making these available in an e-learning infrastructure.