Establishing Core Concepts for Information-Powered Collaborations

Science benefits tremendously from mutual exchanges of information and pooling of effort and resources. The combination of different skills and diverse knowledge is a powerful capacity, source of new intuitions and creative insights. Therefore multidisciplinary approaches can be a great opportunity to explore novel scientific horizons. Collaboration is not only an opportunity, it is essential when tackling today’s global challenges by exploiting our fast growing wealth of data. In this paper we introduce the concept of Information-Powered Collaborations (IPC) — an abstraction that captures those requirements and opportunities. We propose a conceptual framework that partitions the inherent complexity of such dynamic environments and offers concrete tools and methods to thrive in the data revolution era. Such a framework promotes and enables information sharing from multiple heterogeneous sources that are independently managed. We present the results of assessing our approach as an IPC for solid-Earth sciences: the European Plate Observing System (EPOS).