Let’s discuss “cyberinfrastructure”
Participants at the Science Commons-sponsored Designing Cyberinfrastructure conference offered so many different definitions for the word that speakers - only half jokingly suggested that a single set of quotation marks around the word wasn’t enough. And at the end of the two-day event, those intentional quotation marks were still being added.
Entitled ‘Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation’ (DCCI), this conference brought together over 200 participants from across the world ‘ with government personalities commingling with open source advocates, academics, patent experts, and those in the sciences. The jam-packed program included panels ranging from defining ‘cyberinfrastructure’, designing the virtual organization, patent pooling, standards development and discussing the ecology of ‘open’ (another word that accumulated quote marks - as did “commons”).
Science Commons co-sponsored the event with The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the University of Michigan’s School of Information, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Council on Economic Development.
In attendance were members of the House Science Committee Congressmen David Wu (D-Oregon) and Jim Turner (D-Texas), as well as representatives from NSF, National Institute of Health (NIH), IBM, Red Hat, the UK Patent Office, the Library of Congress, the Federation of American Scientists, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and many more. For a glimpse at the speaker list, click here.
The event was a success, opening the lines of discussion about a very important yet multi-faceted concept that some struggle to define. ‘Cyberinfrastructure’ is said to offer the vision necessary that integrates diverse resources across barriers based on time, location and jurisdictions. These ‘diverse resources’ consist of supercomputers, mass storage, networking, databases and digital libraries, software, education, training etc. The ‘barriers’ aspect can be physical, geographical, financially based, an issue of sustainable models and so on. No wonder there were so many quotation marks added.
But, with that said, cyberinfrastructure ‘ in any of these working definitions ‘ was seen by many at the conference to hold the key to moving forward in the digital age as technology evolves and the need grows for an integrated system. This was evident not only in conversations among personalities at the event but from the presentations themselves, a common curiosity and belief in this model to some degree.
For more information about the conference, please visit the conference website.
Photograph: Rotunda at the National Academy of Science, by tvol, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0