Coordinator: Professor Giulio SANDINI, DIST, University of Genova.
The purchase of laboratory equipment often involves a time consuming market search, and a risk of investment in inappropriate equipment. Incompatibility of equipment is a major source of inefficiency in collaborative research projects. An important role for ECVnet will be to share information about the capabilities and problems of available laboratory equipment and application platforms. Such sharing should lead to coordinated equipment acquisition with the goal of enhancing compatibility between sites. Such coordination could avoid lost time due to errors and redundant work, and may lead to sub-communities which share software and hardware expertise for common equipment.