Designing Highly Flexible and Usable Cyberinfrastructures for Convergence

Abstract

This article presents the results of a 7-year-long quest into the development of a "dream tool" for our research in information science and scientometrics and more recently, network science. The results are two cyberinfrastructures (CI): The Cyberinfrastructure for Information Visualization and the Network Workbench that enjoy a growing national and interdisciplinary user community. Both CIs use the cyberinfrastructure shell (CIShell) software specification, which defines interfaces between data sets and algorithms/services and provides a means to bundle them into powerful tools and (Web) services. In fact, CIShell might be our major contribution to progress in convergence. Just as Wikipedia is an "empty shell" that empowers lay persons to share text, a CIShell implementation is an "empty shell" that empowers user communities to plug-and-play, share, compare and combine data sets, algorithms, and compute resources across national and disciplinary boundaries. It is argued here that CIs will not only transform the way science is conducted but also will play a major role in the diffusion of expertise, data sets, algorithms, and technologies across multiple disciplines and business sectors leading to a more integrative science.

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