Material Detail

My work is frequently motivated by the information technology concerns of "big science", a frequently fascinating source of problems for the computer scientist due to the broad scope and ambitious goals of many scientific communities. I speak here about work that seeks to rethink science's information technology foundations in terms of service-oriented architecture. In principle, service- oriented approaches can have a transformative effect on scientific communities, allowing tools formerly accessible only to the specialist to be made available to all, and permitting previously manual data processing and analysis tasks to be automated. However, while the potential of such "service-oriented science" has been demonstrated, its routine application across many disciplines raises challenging technical problems. One important requirement is to achieve a separation of concerns between discipline-specific content and domain- independent infrastructure; another is to streamline the formation and evolution of the "virtual organizations" that create and access content. I describe the architectural principles, software, and deployments that I am and my colleagues have produced as we tackle these problems, and point to future technical challenges and scientific opportunities.

Disciplines:

• Science and Technology  / Nanotechnology