Online tools accelerate progress in earthquake engineering, science

include high-speed networks, laptops, servers and software,” he said. “The sociology includes the software-development process, the way we gather and prioritize user requirements and needs and our work with user communities. To be successful, a cyberinfrastructure effort needs to address both the technology and social elements, which has been our approach.”

The project warehouse and NEEShub collects “metadata,” or descriptive information about research needed to ensure that the information can be accessed in the future.

“Say you have an experiment with sensors over a structure to collect data like voltages over time or force displacements over time,” Eigenmann said. “What’s important for context is not only the data collected, but from which sensor, when the experiment was conducted, where the sensor was placed on the structure. When someone comes along later to reuse the information they need the metadata.”

The resources are curated, meaning the data are organized in a fashion that ensures they haven’t been modified and are valid for reference in the future.

“We take extra steps to ensure the long-term integrity of the data,” Hacker said.

NEEShub contains more than 1.6 million project files stored in more than 398,000 project directories and has been shown to have at least 65,000 users over the past year. Other metrics information is available here.

“We are seeing continued growth in the number of users,” Rathje said. “We are helping to facilitate and enable the discovery process. We have earthquake engineering experts and civil engineering experts closely involved with every aspect of our IT and cyberinfrastructure, and we are constantly getting feedback and prototyping.”

To help quantify the impact on research, projects are ranked by how many times they are downloaded. One project alone has had 3.3 million files downloaded.

“We have a curation dashboard for each project, which gives the curation status of the information so that users know whether it’s ready to be cited and used,” Hacker said.

The site also has a DOI, or digital object identifier, for each project.

“It’s like a permanent identifier that goes with the data set,” he said. “It gives you a permanent link to the data.”

NEES researchers will continue to study the impact of cyberinfrastructure on engineering and scientific progress.

“The use and adoption of cybeinfrastructure by a community is a process,” Hacker said. “At the beginning of the process we can measure the number of visitors and people accessing information. The ultimate impact of the cyberinfrastructure will be reflected in outcomes such as the number of publications that have benefited from using the cyberinfrastructure. It takes several years to follow that process and we are in the middle of that right now, but evidence points to a significant impact.”

— Read more in Thomas Hacker et al., “Advancing Earthquake Engineering Research through Cyberinfrastructure,” Journal of Structural Engineering 139, Special Issue: NEES 1: Advances in Earthquake Engineering (14 June 2013): 1099–111 (doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)ST.1943-541X.0000712)