A platform for all that we know: creating a knowledge-driven research infrastructure

C omputer systems have become a vital part of the modern research environment, supporting all aspects of the research lifecycle [1]. The community uses the terms " eScience " and " eResearch " to highlight the important role of computer technology in the ways we undertake research, collaborate, share data and documents, submit funding applications , use devices to automatically and accurately collect data from experiments, deploy new generations of microscopes and telescopes to increase the quality of the acquired imagery, and archive everything along the way for provenance and long-term preservation [2, 3]. However, the same technological advances in data capture, generation, and sharing and the automation enabled by computers have resulted in an unprecedented explosion in data—a situation that applies not only to research but to every aspect of our digital lives. This data deluge, especially in the scientific domain, has brought new research infrastructure challenges, as highlighted by Jim Gray and Alex Szalay [4]. The processing, data transfer, and storage demands are far greater today than just a few years ago. It is no surprise that we are talking about the emergence of a new research methodology—the " fourth paradigm " —in science.