Towards a virtual organization for data cyberinfrastructure

We report on the exploratory stages of multi-university, multi-research-site, multi-year effort to investigate and compare data practices in multiple cyberinfrastructure projects and their emerging virtual organizations. Our long-term goal is to understand the data practices and data management requirements of virtual organizations and their implications for the design and development of data digital libraries. We have constructed our own virtual organization as a participant-observer approach to the research. Results to date suggest that collaborative technologies are emergent and that defining and scoping the data products of collaborations continues to be problematic.