Scientific and engineering research has been crucial in both the creation and the advanced application of the amazing products of the digital revolution begun some sixty years ago – a revolution that increasingly undergirds our modern world. Advances in computational technology continue to transform scientific and engineering research, practice, and allied education. Recently, multiple accelerating trends are converging and crossing thresholds in ways that show extraordinary promise for an even more profound and rapid transformation – indeed a further revolution – in how we create, disseminate, and preserve scientific and engineering knowledge. We now have the opportunity and responsibility to integrate and extend the products of the digital revolution to serve the next generation of science and engineering research and education. We call this revolution “e-Science”.
Digital computation, data, information, and networks are now being used to replace and extend traditional efforts in science and engineering research, indeed to create new disciplines. The classic two approaches to scientific research, theoretical/analytical and experimental/observational, have been extended to in silico simulation to explore a larger number of possibilities at new levels of temporal and spatial fidelity. Advanced networking enables people, tools, and information to be linked in ways that reduce barriers of location, time, institution, and discipline. In numerous fields new distributed-knowledge environments are becoming essential, not optional, for moving to the next frontier of research. Science and engineering researchers are again at the forefront in both creating and exploiting what many are now seeing as a nascent revolution and a forerunner of new capabilities for broad adoption in our knowledge-driven society.
A vast opportunity exists for creating new research environments based upon e-science, but there are also real dangers of disappointing results and wasted investment for a variety of reasons including underfunding in amount and duration, lack of understanding of technological futures, excessively redundant activities between science fields or between science fields and industry, lack of appreciation of social/cultural barriers, lack of appropriate organizational structures, inadequate related educational activities, and increased technological (“not invented here”) balkanizations rather than interoperability among multiple disciplines. The opportunity is enormous, but also enormously complex, and must be approached in a long-term, comprehensive way. It is imperative to begin a well-conceived and funded program to seize these opportunities and to avoid potentially increasing opportunity costs.
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