With the advent of increasing network speeds and technologies dealing with the internet and the World Wide Web, the potential exists for research at large user facilities to become a more distributed process in terms of manpower. We envision that in the future, it should be possible to send fewer people to research facilities, while others monitor and control experiments from remote locations. This concept might be extended to the point that only samples to be analyzed are sent to a facility, set up by an on-site technician, and the experiment would be largely controlled by a researcher at a distant site. For this to be feasible, software will need to be developed to provide the remote operator with most of the same control mechanisms and feedback that now exists only at the research station. With this in mind we present a web-based beamline control/monitoring program that demonstrates the potential for utilizing the web for remote operations.
(posted 17-Oct-97 jw)