The Social Information Infrastructure

Abstract

The Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research of the National Science Foundation has explored aggressively the potential involvement of the social sciences in the National Information Infrastructure. We invision the NII as a global network of computer communications, which will evolve out of the Internet, linking all social scientists to massive digital libraries and to myriad smaller distributed data sources containing information of every imaginable sort. Five workshops have charted applications of high-performance computing in the social and behavioral sciences: cognitive science, computational geography, computational economics, artificial social intelligence, and electronic networks. A survey of SBER programs revealed that many are helping to create the information infrastructure, and substantial investment in six "flagship" digital library projects will develop the systems necessary for the NII of the 21st century. Keywords: information infrastructure, digital library, cognitive science, computational geography, computational economics, artificial intelligence, Internet.