You can download the whole book, or individual sections or subsections. The book, edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley and Kirstin Tolle, is being released in conjunction with the Microsoft E-science meeting currently being held at Carnegie-Mellon University.
The book is dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray and explores his intellectual legacy in Earth and Environment, Health and Well Being, Scientific Infrastructure, and Scholarly Communication. Many of the chapters are by authors well-known within the CNI community, particularly in the Scholarly Communications section, which includes contributions by Timo Hanny, Paul Ginsparg, Herbert Van de Somple and Carl Lagoze; I also had the opportunity to contribute a chapter for this section. I would urge CNI-announce readers to at least browse beyond the Scholarly Communications section; there are a number of important chapters on broader developments in e-science that I think will be of interest. There’s also a short interview wtih Tony Hey about the book at

Rensselaer Researchers to Create Semantic Web Platforms for Massive Scientific Collaboration
The Semantic Web technology being creating in the Tetherless World Research Constellation will allow scientists, educators, and people around the world to access data on a variety of topics all in one place, bringing together scientific data in unprecedented ways. Represented here are just some of the areas that would intersect during a search for data on the Earth’s atmosphere. Credit: Rensselaer/Peter Fox and Deborah McGuinness.

Semantic technology will bring together the data of scientists, teachers, and even the general public

Web scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will use the World Wide Web to compile and share scientific data on an unprecedented scale. Their goal is to hasten scientific discovery and innovation by enabling rapid and easy collaboration between scientists, educators, students, policy makers, and even “citizen scientists” around the world via the Web……

source: resource shelf (such a great resource)

This project has brought together the distinct communities of data support staff in universities and institutional repository managers to bridge gaps and exploit the expertise of both to advance the current provision of repository services for accommodating datasets, and thus to explore new pathways to assist academics at our institutions who wish to share their data over the Internet.

Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench is designed to help scientists in data-intensive fields such as medical research, astronomy, environmental science, and oceanography make sense of data more quickly in real time, using a better visual interface

source: Chronicle of Higher Education