“Personas” to Support Development of Cyberinfrastructure for Scientific Data Sharing

Objective: To ensure that cyberinfrastructure for sharing scientific data is useful, system developers need to understand what scientists and other intended users do with data as well as the attitudes and beliefs that shape that use. This paper introduces personas—detailed descriptions of an “archetypical user of a system”—as an approach for capturing and sharing knowledge about potential system users.