The D4Science social networking facilities

Modern science call 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 Hybrid Data Infrastructure, D4Science, developed to serve the needs of various communities of practice yet based on a technology which is domain agnostic. By leveraging social computing and cloud computing D4Science realises an integrated web-based working environment where scientists have at their fingertips what is needed to accomplish a scientific investigation. We present the large scale data management and processing facilities obtained through the use of services compliant with the cloud paradigms. Moreover, we present the large array of collaboration-oriented facilities obtained by integrating social networking paradigms with virtual research environments.