Geoscientists’ Perspectives on Cyberinfrastructure Needs: A Collection of User Scenarios

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is a standard tool in the geosciences, but the creation of successful CI remains difficult, and expensive projects can have significant consequences for scientific communities if they do not result in success. In this paper, we present an effort to solicit feedback on cyberinfrastructure needs from a broad community of geoscientists by means of user scenarios to inform the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) EarthCube program. The method for the user scenarios was semi-structured interviews, a total of 50 of which were collected from a broad range of scientists and analyzed. A wide variety of challenges were identified, with the most commonly articulated challenges being an inability to find data of interest in an online repository, the heterogeneity of data and metadata, the lack of needed software (which in turn drove redundant development of needed software in multiple groups), and insufficient or unstable funding for long-term cyberinfrastructure. While the user scenarios do not provide formal requirements in the software engineering sense, they do provide expressions of user challenges that, in many cases, are sufficiently detailed to inform high-level requirement development.