Mapping e-Science's path in the collaboration space: an ontological approach to monitoring infrastructure development

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den Besten, Matthijs; David, Paul A.

We introduce the "virtual laboratory ontology" (VLO) and show how its application to e-Science yields a mapping of the distribution of projects in several dimensions of the "collaboration space." In doing so, we also examine a closely related effort to map the projects that were funded by the e-Science core programme and point to possible reasons for disappointing aspects of the latter's results. In the full paper, we will examine collateral data from UK e-Science projects to explore two hypotheses that could account for the data-centric focus revealed by the first application of the VLO framework:

• distributed databases are of central importance to a wide array of science and engineering fields, and tools for federation, annotation and facilitated access form a logical priority in middleware development (H1);
• there is an aversion to organizing projects that require close collaborative work among research groups that would transcend institutional or organizational boundaries (H2).

Applying the lens of VLO again, our paper will translate the finding into a set of conclusions that will exhibit the utility of this mapping approach, and, it is to be hoped, also be substantively useful for future cyberinfrastructure construction programmes.

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