Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The list of excluded topics is as follows:
•
Specific organisational budgets
•
Decisions of what to preserve i.e. appraisal - although clearly some co-ordination
wouldbeuseful
•
Specific domain software
•
Specific national legal aspects - although the ability to cope with a variety of
these must be built into the infrastructure.
24.7.1 Relevant Documents
•
Report on Roadmapping of Large Research Infrastructures, 2008, OECD
International Scientific Co-operation (Global Science Forum). Retrieved from
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/49/36/41929340.pdf
•
Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions and Design
http://www.si.
umich.edu/~pne/PDF/ui.pdf
24.7.2 Implementations
One can see from the above that it is possible to add an extra column to Table
24.1
showing some possible implementations of the solutions.
Many are related to the work reported in this topic; others require economic, legal
and social aspects to their solution.
24.8 Relationship to Other Infrastructures
Figure
24.5
illustrates one view of the interaction between infrastructure levels.
The model we adopt here is that each organisation (or discipline, or country)
forms its own “island of capability”, for example a country has its own network
connectivity. The infrastructure which we are thinking about is that which connects
these “islands”. This is consistent with the idea of an infrastructure being something
which provides common facilities across for example heterogeneous disciplines.
At the lowest level we have the network layer. Here the infrastructure components
are things like interconnects, gateways and internetwork management centres.
The network layer supplies capabilities to the next level up, which consists
of “islands of capabilities” of storage and compute power each with its own
local authentication and authorisation systems. The infrastructure components are
things like resource registries, schedulers, cross-organisation process identifiers and
connections between authentication systems.
In turn these supply services to “island of capabilities” of repositories of digi-
tally encoded information which have their own sets of data, users and automated
