iPlant Collaborative

An organizing principle of the iPC will be Grand Challenge teams, cross-disciplinary, community-driven research groups that work collaboratively with iPC staff to design and develop ‘Discovery Environments’, software platforms custom designed to help the team address a Grand Challenge question. Discovery Environments will typically take the form of “mashup” applications which facilitate the integration of diverse types of data and tools, but beneath their surface simplicity discovery environments will support sophisticated systems for semantic integration, description, and manipulation of biological data types. Discovery Environments will be integrated into the growing infrastructure of the iPC, becoming in time an open source resource that is expanded and maintained by the community as a whole.

The scientific community will be encouraged to participate in, and take ownership of, the iPC via a wide range of synthesis activities, including smaller Discovery Environment design groups that are not necessarily associated with Grand Challenge Teams; a web-based virtual community center; outreach teams that train users, including those at undergraduate and minority-serving institutions, to use the iPC infrastructure to its best effect; and by partnering and developing synergistic, integrated ties with other centers, such as the ecology synthesis center (NCEAS) and the evolution synthesis center (NESCent).