United States federal research funders use the term
cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced
data acquisition,
data storage,
data management,
data integration,
data mining,
data visualization and other
computing and information processing
services distributed over the
Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.