e-Science and Licklider

It is no coincidence that it was at CERN, the particle-physics accelerator laboratory in Geneva, that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Given the distributed nature of the multi-institute collaborations required for modern particle-physics experiments, the particle-physics community desperately needed a tool for exchanging information. After a slow start, their community enthusiastically adopted the Web for information exchange within their experimental collaborations – the first Web site in the USA was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Since its beginnings in the early 1990s, the Web has taken by storm not only the entire scientific world but also the worlds of business and recreation. Now, just a decade later, scientists need to develop capabilities for collaboration that go far beyond those of the Web. Besides being able to access information from different sites they want to be able to use remote computing resources, to integrate, federate, and analyze information from many disparate and distributed data resources, and to access and control remote experimental equipment. The ability to access, move, manipulate, and mine data is the central requirement of these new collaborative-science applications – be they data held in a file or database repositories, data generated by accelerators or telescopes, or data gathered from mobile sensor networks.

At the end of the 1990s, John Taylor became Director General of Research Councils at the Office of Science and Technology (OST) in the UK – roughly equivalent to Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA. Before his appointment to the OST, Taylor had been Director of HP Laboratories in Europe and HP as a company have long had a vision of computing and IT resources as a “utility.” Rather than purchase expensive IT infrastructure outright, users in the future would be able to pay for IT services as they require them, in the same way as we use the conventional utilities such as electricity, gas, and water. In putting together a bid to government for an increase in science funding, Taylor realized that many areas of science could benefit from a common IT infrastructure to support multidisciplinary and distributed collaborations. He therefore articulated a vision for this type of collaborative science and introduced the term “e-Science”: