A social networking research environment for scientific data sharing: the D4Science offering

Modern science calls for innovative practices to facilitate research collaborations that span institutions, disciplines, and countries. Scientists and practitioners are called to produce enhanced forms of scientific communication thus to make it possible for others to identify errors, to support, reject or refine theories and to reuse data for further understanding and knowledge. This scenario can benefit a lot from Internet-based services aiming at providing individual users having at their disposal scarce resources with interaction-oriented facilities, i.e., social computing, and elastic access to facilities on demand, i.e., cloud computing. In this paper, we present the D4Science approach that by leveraging social computing and cloud computing realises an integrated web-based working environment where scientists have at their fingertips what is needed to accomplish a scientific investigation. In particular, we present the large array of collaboration-oriented facilities obtained by integrating social networking paradigms with virtual research environments.