CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE REQUIREMENTS FOR RESEARCH COMMUNITIES

Cyberinfrastructure refers to the computational infrastructure that supports the productivity and impact of scientific fields. Many scientific fields of study rely on science gateways such as HUBzero to build cyberinfrastructure portals that offer standard features such as databases, simulation, visualization, and grid tools. This article aims to analyze requirements that align with the main goals of cyberinfrastructure. Some of the goals are to promote research, encourage interdisciplinarity, automate repetitive research steps, and to enable reproducibility and data sharing, among others, thus supporting the productivity of expenditures in science & technology. We analyze the problem cyberinfrastructure is intended to solve by focusing on entry barriers to research communities, illustrating it with the case-based reasoning community. Our study suggests additional features to existing cyberinfrastructure portals such as services to help researchers find funding and job opportunities, and where employers and funders can find researchers (e.g., expert locator engines), and the inclusion of a citation management system to facilitate creation and management of metadata for scientific workflows and other products.