There is an intense discussion at international level on e-infrastructures and data infrastructure serving scientific work.
[1] These are modeled as layered hardware and software systems which support sharing of a wide spectrum of resources, spanning from networks, storage, computing resources, and system-level middleware software, to structured information within collections, archives, and databases.
[3] The Cyberinfrastructure programme launched by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) plans to develop new research environments in which advanced computational, collaborative, data acquisition and management services are made available to researchers connected through high-performance networks.
[5] This vision document highlighted the open issues affecting data infrastructures development – both technical and organizational – and identified future research directions.
Besides these initiatives targeting “generic” infrastructures there are others oriented to specific domains, e.g. the European Commission promotes the INSPIRE initiative for an e-Infrastructure oriented to the sharing of content and service resources of European countries in the ambit of geospatial datasets.