Cyberinfrastructure system

Overview
Cyberinfrastructure systems have gradually evolved over the last three decades. Although they are now beginning to be seen as an integral system, they were largely created as a loose federation of specialized systems for computing, storage and visualization. These systems gradually became enmeshed with each other and with specially commissioned digital libraries and other distributed repositories of data. This then led to the birth of advanced search tools for the dynamic cataloging of the ever growing corpus of data. Many societal systems, such as banking, power, education, transportation and law enforcement are now reforming themselves over the cyberinfrastructure. NSF Workshop Report, Cyberinfrastructure Research for Homeland Security (Feb. 26-27, 2003) (full-text).