Mapping e-Science’s Path in the Collaboration Space: Ontological Approach to Monitoring Infrastructure Development

In an undertaking such as the U.S. Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, or the UK e-science program, which span many years and comprise a great many projects funded by multiple agencies, it can be very difficult to keep tabs on what everyone is doing. But, it is not impossible. In this paper, we propose the construction of ontologies as a means of monitoring a research program’s portfolio of projects. In particular, we introduce the “virtual laboratory ontology” (VLO) and show how its application to e-Science yields a mapping of the distribution of projects in several dimensions of the “collaboration space.” In this paper, we sketch out a method to induce a project mapping from project descriptions and present the resulting map for the UK e-science program. This paper shows the proposed mapping approach to be informative as well as feasible, and we expect that its further development can prove to be substantively useful for future work in cyber-infrastructure-building.