The research on the project was conducted at Imperial College London as a collaboration between the Departments of Computing, Physics, Biochemistry and Earth Science & Engineering.
It originally considered requirements from applications in life science, geo-hazard monitoring, environmental modelling and renewable energy.
It is an e-Science platform based on a workflow model supporting the integration of distributed data sources and analytical tools thus enabling the end-users to derive new knowledge from devices, sensors, databases, analysis components and computational resources that reside across the Internet or grid.
The system is based on a multi-tier architecture, with a workflow server providing a number of supporting functions needed for workflow authoring and execution, such as integration and access to remote computational and data resources, collaboration tools, visualisers and publishing mechanisms.
The architecture itself evolved over the years focusing on the internals of the workflow server (Ghanem et al. 2009) to support extensibility over multiple application domains as well as different execution environments.
This is an important feature since scientific experiments typically generate and use large amounts of heterogeneous and distributed data sets.
As an example, chemical compounds represented in the widely used SMILES (Simplified molecular input line entry specification) format can be imported inside data tables, where they can be rendered adequately using either a three-dimensional representation or its structural formula.
The Discovery Net technology and system have also evolved into commercial products though the Imperial College spinout company InforSense Ltd, which further extended and applied the system in a wide variety of commercial applications as well as through further research projects, including SIMDAT, TOPCOMBI, BRIDGE and ARGUGRID[citation needed].