Global e-Infrastructures
In a more and more globalized world where most of the businesses are tightly interconnected one another across continents, scientific research is following the thread and it is moving in the same direction putting together efforts and knowledge resources developed worldwide by different organizations and research centres developping Global Virtual Research Communities.
The role of the Global Virtual Research Communities (GVRC) is becoming more and more fundamental for research bodies at a national and international level. Europe was the first to understand the major extent to which e-Infrastructures could effect the processes and results involved in experiments and new discoveries in the various research areas such as physics, bioinformatics, biology, astronomy, geology and chemistry.
The relevance of GVRCs is not to be seen only as professional users adopting the e- Infrastructures tools and applications in the most effective and fruitful way but also to boost new research technologies according to the most basic market law of offer/demand – the ‘push’ to the development of new technology responds to the ‘pull’ from the virtual communities. The role of GRVCs is then twofold as they are both users and consultants, adopters and experts of the e-Infrastructure technologies, and they are the ones who express their need for more and more powerful and fast broadband connections with the state-of-the-art research centres scattered all over the world in order to merge the results of their studies with those of their colleagues worldwide and join effort in the search for important discoveries with a high impact on society and scientific progresses.
Thanks to the needs of the GRVCs the International Networking e-Infrastructures are emerging worldwide expanding their connections between one another across the continents.
International Networking e-Infrastructures grouped by geographical coverage:
