Cristina Videira Lopes (PI), Michael Goodrich (co-PI), and Stanley Grant (co-PI) of University of California, Irvine, with Roberto Tamassia (subcontractor) of Brown University
The California Sustainable Watershed Information Manager (CalSWIM: http://calswim.org) is a cyberinfrastructure supporting the dissemination and analysis of watershed information in Southern California. CalSWIM provides watershed stakeholders ? scientists, regulators, and the general public ? access to stream monitoring data and relevant GIS geospatial data, and the ability to analyze data with modeling tools of varying sophistication.
Like so many other scientific cyberinfrastructures, the CalSWIM web site has been a closed infrastructure, i.e. its update has been controlled by a small number of individuals, and any changes to it require the intervention of web-knowledgeable professionals. This model does not scale to the ambition of the CalSWIM project. In order to make this cyberinfrastructure sustainable, expandable, outreaching, and continually up-to-date, we are currently transforming CalSWIM into an Open Collaborative Information Repository, in the form of a wiki with advanced content management features, including databases, GIS layers, and other forms of digital data. By opening CalSWIM in a wiki manner, we empower the domain experts to update the site directly, without requiring them to have web programming knowledge. We also provide a framework for engaging the general public in the process, therefore benefiting from the public's critical supervision of the content, and from valuable volunteer contributions that cannot occur in a closed infrastructure. The current work aims at creating a publicly updatable encyclopedia of ?all things watershed? that includes all watersheds in California.
Open information infrastructures such as the one we are developing are sometimes met with skepticism from their users. The chaotic nature of Wikipedia ? one the most visible collaborative information repositories ? will not be appropriate for open cyberinfrastructures supporting collaboration over scientific and regulatory information. The CalSWIM wiki will only succeed if issues of trust are taken into consideration in its design. Trust is a complex concept based on personal and social factors, that includes assurances about data security, knowledge about data provenance, knowledge about authors' reputations, and assurances about author attribution (citations and quotations) in uncontrolled contexts.
This project will design, develop, and deploy a trust layer on top of open information repositories, such as the CalSWIM wiki, that will minimize the existence of poor-quality information and also minimize the effect of malicious information manipulation. Our approach is based on a mixture of access control systems, reputation management systems, and data integrity algorithms. More specifically, the outputs of this project will be: (1) A new trust management model specifically designed to address the needs of collaborative scientific and regulatory information repositories, where the addition of data and the creation of data analyses is open to scientists, regulatory agencies, interest groups, and the general public. This trust model will be implemented as a software package, and it will be made publicly available as open source. (2) A new method and visualization system for ensuring the integrity of data used (i.e., ?quoted?) in uncontrolled contexts based on cryptographic hash functions and prooflets. (3) A concrete deployment of the previous two items in one specific cyberinfrastructure, CalSWIM, along with an assessment of how effective they are in managing trust.
Although the CalSWIM wiki is the concrete cyberinfrastructure on which this trust management component will be deployed, the trust management component developed in this project can be applied to a variety of Collaborative Information Repositories that share the properties of CalSWIM ? namely, data-based collaboration between scientists, regulatory agencies, and the general public. We will disseminate the results of this project and make it widely available to other groups by using the open source model and by making an outreach effort to those organizations that could benefit from adopting this model.
