From Shared Databases to Communities of Practice: A Taxonomy of Collaboratories

Abstract

Promoting affiliation between scientists is relatively easy, but creating larger organizational structures is much more difficult, due to traditions of scientific independence, difficulties of sharing implicit knowledge, and formal organizational barriers. The Science of Collaboratories (SOC) project conducted a broad five‐year review to take stock of the diverse ecosystem of projects that fit our definition of a collaboratory and to distill lessons learned in the process. This article describes one of the main products of that review, a seven‐category taxonomy of collaboratory types. The types are: Distributed Research Centers, Shared Instruments, Community Data Systems, Open Community Contribution Systems, Virtual Communities of Practice, Virtual Learning Communities, and Community Infrastructure Projects. Each of the types is defined and illustrated with one example, and key technical and organizational issues are identified.

Coordinating Advanced Crowd Work: Extending Citizen Science

“…The next logical step appeared to be involving a group of volunteers in scientific collaboration through the entire process of scientific research, from data analysis to publication, which seemed like a credible goal. The project can be seen as moving the Zooniverse from what Bos, et al [4] term an Open Community Contribution System to a Distributed Research Center.…”

Human-centered e-science: A group-theoretic perspective on cyberinfrastructure design

“…Rather, we are using an interpretive and critical approach to analyze the literature based on constructs from TIP theory in addition to utilizing the expertise of the researchers in the CI, CSCW and HCI domains. Bos et al [13] used a similar approach for evaluating CI research when developing a taxonomy of CI collaboratories. While the contributions of Bos et al's taxonomy of collaboratories has been invaluable to our understanding of the breadth of CI in practice, we aim to complement their technological and functionally oriented taxonomy of the types of CI with a group focused analysis of CI research that reveals less about the different types of CI projects and more about the ways in which CI is influenced by groups and vice versa.…”

Metadata Realities for Cyberinfrastructure: Data Authors as Metadata Creators

“…CENS is an ideal setting in which to study the emergent changes in scientific research that are being brought about by advanced technology. CENS is a distributed research center [3] based at UCLA with five partnering institutions in central and southern California. Over 200 faculty members, students, and research staff from a number of disciplines are associated with CENS at any given time.…”