Unidata: A Virtual Community Sharing Resources via Technological Infrastructure

Abstract

In initiating the Unidata Program, scientists hoped to meet common needs for accessing and using atmospheric data in education and research using state-of-the-art technology. As communications technologies have advanced, Unidata has increasingly become a “virtual community” in which participants cooperate, collaborate, and share a variety of resources, including data. The Unidata experience—how it resembles and differs from other concepts of location-independent collaborations—may serve as a model for building and supporting communities of researchers and educators with common needs for data and the tools to use them.