|
||
|
Keynotes Key Sessions Contributed Sessions ------------ Scientific Program and Abstracts ------------ Proceedings Submission Instructions
|
Scientific Data and Knowledge within the Information Society 22-25 October 2006, Beijing e-Science and Cyberinfrastructure |
|
|
Tony Hey The Internet was the inspiration of J.C.R.Licklider when he was at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960’s. In those pre-Moore’s Law days, Licklider imagined a future in which researchers could access and use computers and data from anywhere in the world. He funded an elite group of Computer Science Departments in the USA – which he called his ‘InterGalactic Computing Group’ - to explore how to realize his vision. Today, as everyone knows, the killer applications of the Internet were email in the 1970’s and Tim Berners- Lee’s World Wide Web in the 1990’s which was developed initially as a collaboration tool for the particle physics academic community. In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research – from systems biology and bio-informatics to earth systems science and chemo-informatics. In the context of science and engineering, this is the ‘e-Science’ agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary ‘Cyberinfrastructure’ to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create the new e-Infrastructure. When mature, it is clear that such an infrastructure will support the creation of dynamic ‘Virtual Organizations’ and collaborative environments for many types of application in both academia and industry. This new Cyberinfrastructure will clearly be of relevance to more than just the research community and will support both the e-learning and digital library communities as well as many business applications. This technology is likely also to change the nature of scientific publication with institutional or subject repositories linked to digital archives containing the primary research data.
|
||
|
|
||
