This week in NSDL’s blogosphere Professor Jon Kleinberg’s Cornell Information Science 204 gets underway. The blog is a companion to a course that will “cover how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections.” The first post displays a visualization of Jesus’ associates and speculation about what Jesus’ authority was in establishing these connections.

Last week at the Second Annual Open Repositories Conference in San Antonio keynote speaker Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing, Microsoft, discussed building up the capability for cyberinfrastructure by expanding global collaboration in eScience in key scientific areas along with the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it. He sketched out determining how to manage trust and authority as a significant aspect of the emerging eScience picture.

An aspect of eScience infrastructure will be the ability to establish who says what and how they are related. These connections are significant because, Hey said, “Co-interpretation is a key characteristic of eScience–’Can you read this and tell me what you think?’” In discussing the architecture of this new science paradigm Hey borrowed from Bill Gates’ analysis of a vision for future scientific endeavor that included a user interface showing a mini org chart of who contributed, and how they interacted to display a visual web of authoritative knowledge creation. He also mentioned science blogs, virtual lab notebooks, and experiment records as being services that would enable eScience collaborations.