The Architecture and Design of a Community-based Cloud Platform for Curating Big Data

The digital universe is exponentially producing unprecedented volume of data that has brought benefits, as well as fundamental challenges for the research community. This trend is inherently exciting for the development and deployment of cloud platforms to support research communities curate data. The excitements stems from the fact that researchers can now have more access and discover more value in data, establish relationships between bits and pieces of information from many types of data, and collaborate with a diverse community of researchers from various domains. Technically, however, platform providers must design their infrastructure in such a way that users can easily search, find, share, and seamlessly collaborate. In this paper, we present the architecture and design of a cloud platform and describe how a community of disaster response scientists could use the platform to curate data. Motivation for developing the platform, lessons learnt in overcoming some challenges associated with collaborative and cooperative cloud environments, and future research directions are also presented. The contribution of this research is in the field of cloud infrastructure for supporting data curation activities, and the sustenance of research communities for the utilization of information assets and cyber technologies.