I am Director of Informatics Projects at the Cardiff School of Computer Science and Informatics in Cardiff University.

In this role I am responsible for leading the day-to-day activities and for ensuring that the School of Computer Science and Informatics develops and retains a strategic research capability in the specific areas of healthcare informatics and biodiversity informatics.

You might ask "Why these two domains?". My answer is "well, they both interest me!" But also because both domains represent areas of significant societal importance and impact. Healthcare because it needs to deal with increasingly aged populations suffering from chronic conditions such as heart faillure, lung disease and diabetes, coupled with reductions in the numbers of persons entering the healthcare profession as practitioners. Biodiversity because the future of mankind is inextricably tied up with that of other plants and animals inhabiting our planet and mankind is having an overall negative impact on their wellbeing, which ultimately means our wellbeing. I'm keen to bring the techniques of e-Science to the aid of research in these domains.

A cursory search of the Web will provide several definitions of "e-Science". For example,

• The Wikipedia definition of e-Science
• The National e-Science Centre's definition
• The description used by Research Councils UK

The associated terms "e-Research" and "e-Infrastructure" are often more useful.

Professor Malcolm Atkinson (NeSC), the UK's e-Science envoy, has presented a new definition of e-Science as the "systematic support for collaborative research using advanced ICT"

I like this definition because a) it removes the previous over-emphasis on computational science, numerical analysis and supercomputing as the be all and end all of e-Science; and b) it introduces emphasis to the aspect that is at the heart of e-Science, namely "collaboration".

It is often forgotten that collaboration is the main idea behind the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980's. At CERN, physicists from around the world needed to share their data. They had no common computing machines and no common software that would work across those machines to present / share their information. The Web was the answer.

Today we take the Web pretty much for granted. It pervades many aspects of our life already and it will continue to develop over the coming years. The fundamentals of collaboration, being developed to support e-Science, will contribute to that too.

We hope to bring the e-Science vision to reality in the LifeWatch project, where I am playing a lead role in planning the construction of the technical infrastructure, and in the 4D4Life project, where I chair the Design Team.