Towards a rich-context participatory cyberenvironment

Abstract

To enable and support innovative research in science and engineering, the next generation Cyberinfrastructure must be able to support collaboration across disciplines and conceptual contexts. At NCSA, we are building Cyberenvironments which support “architecture of participation” where user-driven innovation is empowered. In this paper, we will first describe the Cyberenvironment and Web 2.0/Where 2.0 concepts, and present our definition of a participatory Cyberenvironment and the roles of contexts for building such Cyberinfrastructure. We then present our arguments of the importance of supporting the full range of social, geospatial, causal and conceptual contexts. We will describe the foundation work that we have built so far, the CyberCollaboratory (a collaborative portal) and Tupelo (a semantic content repository), and then provide the vision for the path towards a rich context participatory Cyberenvironment with potential impact on scientific communities such as distributed environment observatory networks.