Towards a Virtual Organization for Data Cyberinfrastructure

关于网络基础设施的社会科学研究依赖于零碎的、具体项目的方法来研究社会、技术、组织和文化特征是如何相互交织的。拟议的项目将CI研究推向一个新的水平，即大规模、综合的方法，这些方法将在一系列研究领域、协作方法、项目规模和项目目标中创建可比较的、可重用的数据集。拟议工作的结果是：(1)产生关于虚拟组织和数据基础设施发展的基础社会科学；(2)创建一个具有特定目标的功能性虚拟组织，以研究数据实践和数据政策；(3)确定对数据、数据分析和可视化方面的CI工作进行形成性评估的方法，这些方法将通过项目之间的持续比较而丰富。长期目标是建立一个CI虚拟天文台，用于数据研究、数据分析和可视化。为了实现这一目标，拟议的为期一年的项目将进行必要的背景研究，以开发这样一个虚拟组织，确定最有效的虚拟组织模型，并确定有关数据，数据分析和可视化的研究问题，这些问题必须解决，以构建一个可行的网络基础设施。作为一个试验台，该项目将专注于汇集环境和大气科学领域CI项目的主要参与者。

Social science research on cyberinfrastructure has relied upon piecemeal, project-specific approaches to studying how social, technical, organizational and cultural features intertwine. The proposed project will move CI studies to the next level toward large-scale, integrative approaches that will create comparable, reusable datasets across a range of research areas, collaboration methods, project scales, and project goals. The outcomes of the proposed work are (1) to produce fundamental social science about infrastructure development for virtual organizations and for data; (2) to create a functioning virtual organization with a specific set of goals to study data practice and data policy; and (3) to identify methods for formative evaluation of CI efforts on data, data analysis, and visualization that will be enriched by continual comparisons between projects. The long-term goal is to establish a CI Virtual Observatory for the study of data, data analysis, and visualization. Toward that goal, the proposed one-year project will undertake the necessary background research to develop such a virtual organization, to identify the most effective models for a virtual organization, and to identify the research questions about data, data analysis, and visualization that must be addressed to construct a viable cyberinfrastructure. As a test bed, the project will focus on bringing together principal players of CI projects in the environmental and atmospheric sciences.