Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
cyberinfrastructure provided by organizations like Unidata allows students to access
the very databases and tools that are used by the scientifi c and operational commu-
nities, and provides an important pathway toward the pursuit of the long-sought goal
of the NSF to integrate research and education. Distributed computing, data access,
and collaboration are rapidly becoming the de facto means for learning and doing
science, leading to the pervasive use of the World Wide Web in everyday life of a sci-
entist, an educator, or a student. This reliance on the Internet and other technologies
and applications is only expected to increase greatly in the future.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Computers and information technologies are now playing a central role in this com-
plex and ever-changing world in which we live and work, with the World Wide Web
reshaping almost every aspect of our work, including education, research, and com-
merce. Computing, communications and IT trends of recent years have not only had a
democratizing effect on daily life, but they have also changed the very nature of data
services for education and research. For example, below is a partial list of key tech-
nologies and trends that have enabled a new generation of end-to-end data services in
the scientific community:
• Internet
• Commodity microprocessors, enabled by Moore's Law
• World Wide Web
• Open source model
• Object-oriented programming
• Open standards, frameworks, and conventions
• Extensible markup language (XML)
• Web services
• Digital libraries
• Collaboratories
• Grid computing
• Data portals and federated, distributed servers
• GISs
• Ontologies and semantic web
• Data mining and knowledge discovery
This section highlights a few of the above key IT advances and trends that have
revolutionized the provision and use of data in the geosciences. The highlights se-
lected for further discussion are meant neither to provide a comprehensive over-
view of all key advances, nor are the specifi c examples cited sole exemplars of their
myriad implementations. Taken together, however, the above technologies have en-
hanced the ability of data providers to better serve their communities, lower the
costs for the users, and allowed a greater participation in the data activities in a new
networked world.
