Abstract:
The need for service-oriented cyberinfrastructure (CI) has been reported (1–4). Further development of archiving and search tools to accommodate the explosive growth in many fields, particularly in biomedical research, has been emphasized. Archaeology often depends on archived data acquired by other researchers for other purposes, often long ago. Differences in recording protocols, terms, measurement units, and language are commonplace. Data are often obscurely archived and difficult to access, and policies regarding confidentiality vary considerably. Even when databases are accessible, they often differ in size, format, structure, and semantics and seem to defy fusion. In archaeology, research on the most important issues in today’s society—the evolution of culture, the growth in population, and the long-term interaction of cultures with their physical and biological environments—will remain impoverished in the absence of a new generation of cybertools.