Reasoning About Discovery Clouds

A discovery cloud is a set of automated, cloud-hosted services to which individuals may outsource their routine and not-so-routine research tasks: finding relevant data, inferring links between data, running computational experiments, inferring new knowledge claims, evaluating the credibility of knowledge claims produced by others, designing experiments, and so on. If developed successfully, a discovery cloud can accelerate and democratize access to data and knowledge tools and the collaborative construction of new knowledge. Such systems are also fascinating to consider from a reasoning perspective because they integrate great complexity at multiple levels: the underlying cloud-based hardware and software, for which issues of reliability and responsiveness may be paramount; the knowledge bases and inference engines that sit on that cloud substrate, for which issues of correctness may be less well defined; and the human communities that form around the discovery clouds, and that arguably form as much as part of the cloud as the hardware, software, and data. I raise questions here about what it might mean to reason about such systems. I do not provide any answers.