Comparative interoperability project: configurations of community, technology, organization

In this paper we describe the methods, goals and early findings of the research endeavor ´Comparative Interoperability Project´ (CIP). The CIP is an extended interdisciplinary collaboration of information and social scientists with the shared goal of understanding the diverse range of interoperability strategies within information infrastructure building activities. We take interoperability strategies to be the simultaneous mobilization of community, organizational and technical resources to enable data integration. The CIP draws together work with three ongoing collaborative scientific projects (GEON, LTER, Ocean Informatics) that are building information infrastructures for the natural sciences