Community-scale cyberinfrastructure for exploratory science

This chapter presents some of the key aspects of Cyberinfrastructure (CI) research and development targeting community-scale exploratory science. The motivation comes from the fact that successful software for CI is increasing scientific productivity of a single investigator, small groups of scientists as well as dispersed teams spanning multiple institutions. Community scale scientific activities and their informatics requirements are driving the development of new CI solutions. It becomes critical to follow CI design principles based on past, present and future efforts. In addition, dataand hypothesis-driven explorations are fundamental scientific activities leading to discoveries. In this work, our focus is on informatics requirements and CI design principles behind existing software. We have included our experiences and described several prototype CI solutions to support exploratory science.