Cyberinfrastructure Excerpted from "Complex Environmental Systems--Systhesis for Earth, Life, and Society in the 21st Century--A 10-year Outlook for the National Science Foundation," by the NSF Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education, January 2003. Paper copies or an Acrobat PDF version of the full report are available from the ERE web site.

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Cyberinfrastructure refers to advanced data assimilation and curation, networking, modeling, and simulation tools for large-scale, systems level, integrated applications. Cyberinfrastructure provides the capability to change data systems into knowledge systems. Nonetheless, building cyberinfrastructure is a serious undertaking on many technical, financial, and cultural levels. Progress in environmental research and the use of its results are stymied without this infrastructure. NSF, with its broad scope, should take the lead in developing thIs capability. New modes of support and financial incentives from research funding agencies are necessary to ensure that adequate attention is devoted to long-term data management, archiving, and access, and to education.

While computing power, storage capacity, metadata, and networking technology are needs common to many sciences, environmental research faces special challenges at both the national and international scale. Interoperability and common modeling frameworks are required to integrate contributions from many environmental communities. A unique challenge for synthetic environmental research is the integration of four-dimensional (spatio-temporal) data, digital data, and social science data to obtain a holistic view of complex Earth and human systems. Also important are the curation and mining of large and increasing volumes of environmental data, which are often heterogeneous in time, space, format, content, and location, as well as legacy data. The curation of environmental genomic data and associated metadata will become particularly critical in the future with the continuing development of large DNA sequencing facilities. Data assimilation, including networking and management of distributed, real-time, multi-scale observing systems, and decision-support systems are also needed for resource allocation, disaster management, and other societal planning.

Examples of research and education areas include:

• Developing an integrated framework and plan for interdisciplinary environmental cyberinfrastructure, including interagency and public-private partnerships that can support an extensive system.
• Fostering communication and coordination among computer scientists and environmental researchers and educators to develop this innovative, powerful, and accessible infrastructure.
• Developing the organizational structure to provide long-term support for data storage, access, model development, and services for a global clientele of researchers, educators, policy makers, environmental workforce members, and citizens.
• Developing centers for genomic data storage and bioinformatics that allow the incorporation of relevant environmental metadata.