This week’s article “The emergence of spatial cyberinfrastructure” by Wright and Wang basically goes over what cyber infrastructure is, the types, and its applications. While most of the article is just listing different ways to use computers for science and research (this is an oversimplification of course, but when it boils down to it that’s essentially what the article is) it does manage to bring up some points that got me pondering. The first were of course, ‘Man, there are really endless ways to use GIS and computers in scientific research’ and ‘Computers really do help in the advancement of knowledge, especially when it comes to massive datasets and calculations’. On a separate note, the ‘social endeavour’ aspect of CI piqued my interest. It’s weirdly fantastic in the way that sharing data for collaboration is now as simple as putting it up into a ‘cloud’ (still a mind-boggling concept to me – consider the iCloud breach) and that data can be commonly shared due to removing common international collaboration roadblocks like “multilingual, biographical, and temporal ambiguities in the data”. Finally, there was the aspect of ‘the small independent investigator’ is the driving force behind innovation in the scientific research capacity and that a small research project can now blossom into something even larger and more impactful (i.e. as large as group science) which I thought was a pretty awesome perk of using technology. My only qualm about this article is that not a whole lot of discussion was done, it was more of a quick list of ways to use CI – which is okay given that it was only four pages, however I would have preferred to hear a little bit more about each application and how CI helped them.
Until next time,
Nod