scientific, mathematical, and IT skills for their solution.
There is a fast, reliable, inexpensive e-infrastructure providing all communication services. Persons
are connected to the e-infrastructure via personal computer devices that are continuously online. The
networking components of the e-infrastructure invisibly provide optimal connectivity in terms of
performance, reliability, cost, and security. The e-infrastructure physically senses, detects, records, and
curates everything, using all the computers, storage devices, networks, and sensors. Subject to security,
privacy, ownership and commercial rights all computational, storage, detector, and communication facilities
are available to everyone. Detectors and subsystems will occur in all environments, across all industries and
social services, as also in the home environment. Subsystems are embedded within the e-infrastructure — for
example control systems for utilities — including personaltransport. Other subsystems will be robotic for
agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, and other applications. This e-infrastructure vision has major
implications:
1. There is a continuing and accelerating need for ever faster, smaller, cheaper, and more energy-efficient
(and less heat-producing) devices. At some point biologically-inspired systems will dominate and will
compete/cooperate with quantum-based technologies.
2. New ‘intelligent materials’ will be developed, which will allow artifacts to be constructed ‘internet-ready’.
These will range from agricultural products through to manufactured products.
3. The open availability of everything simplifies the physical access and improves the performance,
Including reducing latency, but will demand ever‑increasing performance, scalability, reliability, and
self-management.
4. The middleware of the e-infrastructure bears heavy responsibilities: (a) for providing the self‑*
characteristics (self-managing, self-tuning, self- repairing) of a reliable e-infrastructure; (b) for identification,
authorization, trust, security, privacy, and access control; (c) for hiding the complexity through virtualization
and abstraction, thus providing homogeneous access to and utilization of heterogeneous facilities.
The i-infrastructure relies on the underlying e-infrastructure and converts the data (structured,
semi-structured, and unstructured) to information. The i-infrastructure provides the processing capabilities to
collect, structure, manage, describe, and manipulate the information. It provides computational
modeling/simulation facilities to generate new information. The processing capabilities will be
Service-Oriented Knowledge Utilities (SOKUs) which are discoverable/composable and dynamically