Science and engineering is being revolutionized by the widespread use of cyberinfrastructure, and its potential to predict and manage complex problems such as climate change. In fact, the National Science Foundation has made cyberinfrastructure a central theme in its plans for developing and delivering tools to enhance scientific discovery, and has set out an aggressive set of plans for development of cyberinfrastructure as a national discovery environment.
Critical pieces of cyberinfrastructure include supercomputers, high-capacity, mass-storage systems, system software suites and programming environments, scalable, interactive, visualization tools, productivity-enhancing software libraries and tools, large-scale data repositories and digitized scientific data management systems, and, last but not least, people.
CyberGIS is fundamentally new software framework under development at Georgia Tech that will provide seamless integration of cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis and modeling capabilities. With funding from the National Science Foundation and collaborators at the Georgia Tech College of Computing and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, CyberGIS will shift the current paradigm of GIS and associated spatial analysis/modeling software to create scalable and sustainable software ecosystems while achieving groundbreaking scientific advances in understanding coupled human-natural systems that would be impossible otherwise.