I sent the following to NSF in response to a recent Request for Information (RFI) for Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science and Engineering Research. (The format required an abstract and answers to 3 specific questions.)

Abstract

As the Internet and our dependence on it have grown, the structure and dynamics of the network, and how it relates to the political economy in which it is embedded, have gathered increasing attention by researchers, operators and policy makers. All of these stakeholders bring questions that they lack the capability to answer themselves. Epistemological challenges lie in developing and deploying measurement instrumentation and protocols, expertise required to soundly interpret and use complex data, lack of tools to synthesize different sources of data to reveal insights, data management cost and complexity, and privacy issues. Although a few interdisciplinary projects have succeeded, the current mode of collaboration simply does not scale to the exploding interest in scientific study of the Internet, nor to complex and visionary scientific uses of CAIDA’s data by non-networking experts. We believe the community needs a new shared cyberinfrastructure resource that integrates active Internet measurement capabilities, multi-terabyte data archives, live data streams, heavily curated topology data sets revealing coverage and business relationships, and traffic measurements. Such a resource would enable a broad set of researchers to pursure new scientific directions, experiments, and data products that promote valid interpretations of data and derived inferences.

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