Cyberinfrastructure

Origin

The term National Information Infrastructure had been popularized by Al Gore in the 1990s. This use of the term "cyberinfrastructure" evolved from the same thinking that produced Presidential Decision Directive NSC-63 on Protecting America's Critical Infrastructures (PDD-63). PDD-63 focuses on the security and vulnerability of the nation's "cyber-based information systems" as well as the critical infrastructures on which America's military strength and economic well-being depend, such as the electric power grid, transportation networks, potable water and wastewater infrastructures.

The term "cyberinfrastructure" was used in a press briefing on PDD-63 on May 22, 1998 with Richard A. Clarke, then national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counter-terrorism, and Jeffrey Hunker, who had just been named director of the critical infrastructure assurance office. Hunker stated:

"One of the key conclusions of the President's commission that laid the intellectual framework for the President's announcement today was that while we certainly have a history of some real attacks, some very serious, to our cyber-infrastructure, the real threat lay in the future. And we can't say whether that's tomorrow or years hence. But we've been very successful as a country and as an economy in wiring together our critical infrastructures. This is a development that's taken place really over the last 10 or 15 years—the Internet, most obviously, but electric power, transportation systems, our banking and financial systems."

The term "cyberinfrastructure" was used by a US National Science Foundation (NSF) blue-ribbon committee in 2003 in response to the question: how can NSF, as the nation's premier agency funding basic research, remove existing barriers to the rapid evolution of high performance computing, making it truly usable by all the nation's scientists, engineers, scholars, and citizens? The NSF use of the term focuses on the integrated assemblage of these information technologies with one another.

A workshop on cyberinfrastructure for the social sciences was held in San Diego, California in May 2005. Another conference was held in January 2007 in Washington, D.C. A "CyberInfrastructure Partnership" existed from February 2005 until 2009. A collaboration led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Boston University had a web site called "Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure" (EPIC) which existed from 2005 through 2007. Two NSF sponsored workshops on Financial Cyberinfrastructure were organized in 2010 and 2012 by Louiqa Raschid and Albert "Pete" Kyle University of Maryland, H.V. Jagadish University of Michigan and Mark Flood Office of Financial Research, Department of the Treasury.

Complementing the technical construction of cyberinfrastructure, social scientists in the field of computer supported cooperative work investigate the organizational and social aspects of building these large-scale, distributed resources to support science. Related to this research space is the notion of the collaboratory, originally coined by William Wulf.

Cyberinfrastructure is more often called e-Science or e-Research. In particular, the United Kingdom started an e-Science initiative in 2001.; the Systems Geology initiative of the British Geological Survey is an example. Others distinguish e-Science as the work that is done using the cyberinfrastructure.

There are many inter-governmental advisory groups related to Cyberinfrastructure aspects like E-Infrastructures Reflection Group and European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures dealing with policies on electronic infrastructures for research, i.e. research networks, computing, software and data infrastructures that mainly serve students, researchers and scientists. They advise and recommend actions towards the European Commission (DG CONNECT), the EU Member states governments (Research or Science Ministries), e-Infrastructure providers and users.