My work is frequently motivated by the information technology concerns of "big science", a frequently fascinating source of problems for the computer scientist due to the broad scope and ambitious goals of many scientific communities. I speak here about work that seeks to rethink science's information technology foundations in terms of service-oriented architecture. In principle, service-oriented approaches can have a transformative effect on scientific communities, allowing tools formerly ccessible only to the specialist to be made available to all, and permitting previously manual data-processing and analysis tasks to be automated. However, while the potential of such "service-oriented science" has been demonstrated, its routine application across many disciplines raises challenging technical problems. One important requirement is to achieve a separation of concerns between discipline-specific content and domain-independent infrastructure; another is to streamline the formation and evolution of the "virtual organizations" that create and access content. I describe the architectural principles, software, and deployments that I am and my colleagues have produced as we tackle these problems, and point to future technical challenges and scientific opportunities.
