[sc-announce] What's "cyberinfrastructure"? -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Mon Mar 24 19:15:31 EDT 2008


 What's "cyberinfrastructure"?

March 24th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/03/24/whats-cyberinfrastructure/>by
dwentworth

One of the biggest challenges we face at Science Commons is explaining what
we do — and, much more important, why it matters.

To that end, we are publishing a series of posts to bring more clarity to
the terms and phrases we use. To make sure these posts are truly useful,
we'll be asking for your feedback. Got questions? Criticism? We hope
you'll send
us an email <dwentworth at creativecommons.org> or add your comments to the
post. (Note: the definitions in these posts aren't meant to be formal;
they're aimed at sparking discussion and helping more people understand our
work.)

The first time out, we took on open source knowledge
management<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/12/05/whats-open-source-knowledge-management/>.
This time, we're tackling "cyberinfrastructure."

According to the National Science
Foundation<http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/toc.jsp>,
cyberinfrastructure is "like the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges,
power grids, telephone lines and water systems that support modern society,"
but "refers to the distributed computer, information and communication
technologies combined with the personnel and integrating components that
provide a long-term platform to empower the modern scientific research
endeavor." (People in other countries use different terms for roughly the
same concept; in the UK and Australia, for instance, cyberinfrastructure is
referred to as "e-science" and "e-research," respectively.)

It's important to note that cyberinfrastructure is distinct from the
Internet, which is only one of the elements that it comprises.

To understand the difference, consider the insightful
piece<http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1681526,00.html>that
Alice Park of
TIME wrote last year on why the promising new vaccine for AIDS failed, which
looks beyond biological factors to examine the state of scientific research
as a whole. Writes Park, "Most research occurs in isolation; there's little
coordination among labs and *no network* through which data can be shared,
making it difficult for scientists to learn from each other's missteps"
(emphasis, mine). She goes on to quote Dr. Alan Bernstein of the Global HIV
Vaccine Enterprise, who describes science as an "iterative process" where,
regrettably, "there isn't a lot of iteration going on."

Of course, there is a network that we can use for sharing scientific data:
the Internet. What's missing here is infrastructure — but not in the purely
technical sense. We need more than computers, software, routers and fiber to
share scientific information more efficiently; we also need a legal and
policy infrastructure that supports (and better yet, rewards) sharing.

At Science Commons, we use the term "cyberinfrastructure" — and more often,
"collaborative infrastructure" — in this broader sense. Elements of an
infrastructure can include everything from software and web protocols to
licensing regimes and development policies. Science Commons is working to
facilitate the emergence of an open, decentralized infrastructure designed
to foster knowledge re-use and discovery — one that can be implemented in a
way that respects the autonomy of each collaborator. We believe that this
approach holds the most promise as we continue the transition from a world
where scientific research is carried out by large teams with supercomputers
to a world where small teams — perhaps even individuals — can effectively
use the network to find, analyze and build on one another's data.

If you'd like to learn more about what we're doing, you'll find
details in *Cyberinfrastructure
for Knowledge Sharing*<http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/cyberinfrastructure-for-knowledge-sharing/>,
a *CTWatch Quarterly* piece by our own John Wilbanks If you have
questions, send
us an email <dwentworth at creativecommons.org>. We'd love to hear from you.
................
Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth at creativecommons.org <kaitlin at creativecommons.org>
................
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