A Keynote Address for the Sixth Annual National Conference
on Digital Government Research
May 15-18, 2005, Washington, D.C.
Conference Website
Download Text of Talk (pdf) This text also includes references.
Abstract
The NSF community and other US and non-US science and engineering research funding agencies have recognized that ever more powerful, ubiquitous, and integrated information and communication technology nows offers the potential to transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research and allied education. The platform for such transformation has been dubbed “cyberinfrastructure”(CI for short) and is the basis for cyberinfrastructure-enabled science, or e-science1. Cyberinfrastructure provides reliable services and knowledge on which to build specific instances of organizational forms called for example, collaboratories, grid communities, or community portals.
This talk will review the emergence and status of the “cyberinfrastructure movement” and draw parallels with the emergence of the field of digital government. It will suggest that there is complementary between these lines of endeavor, and that they stay in touch as pathfinders and fellow travelers into the broad application of advanced information technology to facilitate, or potentially revolutionize, complex and important human endeavor.
Dan, in your talk yesterday you mentioned that cyberinfrastructure depreciates faster than bricks and mortar infrastructure, but that it is more generalizable. I thought this was a brilliant point and wondered whether this was your idea or if there are additional sources I could refer to. I would like to use this point and augment with the following observation. If one considered digital libraries, archives, and data repositories as a component of infrastructure, then one could argue that those components accumulate and appreciate in value. From the physical world we have countless examples of collections that far outlive the brick and mortar infrastructure that supported them. In the digital world, it is assumed that the systems (and infrastructure) will also evolve around the collections.
Posted by: Margaret Hedstrom | May 19, 2005 at 05:01 PM
This was my observation but made in a very practical, budgetary sense. It has been my observation that universities and NSF for the most part have had difficultly setting up budgetary support for IT that adequately accounts for the rapid obsolescence of equipment. To stay at the leading edge, for example, NSF-funded supercomputer centers need constant upgrades or replacements. Optical telescopes for the astronomy community stay current a lot longer. Modern computer equipment is more like perishable fruit than traditional capital equipment.
I had not thought of your abstract or generalization but it is a great thought and I encourage you to use and develop it.
Posted by: Dan Atkins | May 21, 2005 at 02:41 PM