Venue Name: Go to 'View' menu > 'Header and Footer' to change14/04/2023 slide 1

VREs and Research Tools

Christopher BrownProgramme Manager

Supporting collaborative research

VRE Definition and Concept

A VRE comprises a set of online tools and other network resources and technologies interoperating with each other to facilitate or enhance the processes of research practitioners within and across institutional boundaries.

A key characteristic of a VRE is that it facilitates collaboration amongst researchers and research teams providing them with more effective means of collaboratively collecting, manipulating and managing data, as well as collaborative knowledge creation.

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VRE Programme Timeline

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Technology Focused. Experimental. Diverse design and developmental

approach.

Standalone Solutions

15 projects

User and Research Practice Focused. Developmental. Unified design and

development models.Integrated pilots 4 demonstrators

Broadening Use. Embedding. Diverse design – community and challenge

driven.

Tools, frameworks and interoperability

10 Projects4 FoF Projects14 RI Projects

15 Projects

VREResearch

Infrastructure

VLE approach to Researchhttp://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre.aspx

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_research.aspx

Research Tools. Wider focus. Tools to enable collaboration, exploit e-infrastructure and help to build

communities within and across domains

1

2

3

VRE2 Demonstrators

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VRE-SDM Oxford University http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/VRE-SDM

CREW Manchester University http://www.crew-vre.net/

myExperiment Southampton University http://www.myexperiment.org/

VERA Reading University http://misc.jisc.ac.uk/vre/taxonomy/term/66

4 demonstrators

VRE2 - Study of Documents and Manuscripts

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VRE2 - myExperiment

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myExperiment has over 7500 members, 300 groups, 2500 workflows, 600 files and 300 packs*

www.myexperiment.org

* As of 15/11/2013

“Facebook for Scientists” ...but different to Facebook!

A repository of research methods

A community social network

A Virtual Research Environment

Open source (BSD) Ruby on Rails application with HTML, REST and SPARQL interfaces

Project started March 2007

Closed beta since July 2007

Open beta November 2007

myExperiment makes it easy to find, use and share scientific workflows and other Research Objects, and to build communities.

VRE3 Projects

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16/05/2011 | Slide 7

Strand 1 - VRE Tools- Video Conversion on PAG Manchester

Strand 2 - VRE Frameworks- IBBRE Southampton

- Collaborative Research in Business (CRIB) Lancaster

- Cancer Imaging VRE Oxford

- ONE VRE Manchester

- BRAIN - Building Research and Innovation Networks Coventry

Strand 3 - VRE InteroperabilityLinkSphere Reading

Text VRE KCL

Virtual Research Integration Collaboration (VRIC)

Southampton

Institutional Scholarly comms & publication sharing Cambridge

VRE3 - BRAIN

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www.project-brain.org

Expertise Search Tool (Stand-alone version)

Researcher Matching Tool (Online version)

VRE3 - IBBRE

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A VRE to support cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration in internet-based behavioural research

Enable behavioural scientists working within a variety of disciplines across the university to collaborate in sharing and reviewing components of internet-delivered interventions

Analyse and describe how the VRE can be flexibly used to support collaborations within and outside the university

LifeGuide enables researchers to design interventions that: – give tailored advice based on the user's answers to questions;– allow users to plan, chart and check their progress;– send follow-up messages to users in the form of personalised emails or texts; – automatically randomise users to different interventions arms;– store all data on user responses and website usage for output to Excel and CSV

http://www.lifeguideonline.org/

VRE3 - VRE-CI

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VRE Toolkit for SP2010

Cancer Imaging VRE (VRE-CI) to provide a framework to allow researchers and clinicians involved in Cancer Imaging to share information, images and algorithms. Builds on the Research Information Centre (RIC) developed for bioscience researchers by the British Library and Microsoft Corporation.

VRERI – Rapid Innovation

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Ami Cambridge University, Peter Murray-Rust

BlogMyData Reading University, Dr J D Blower

CritterVRE Manchester University, Dr Andrew Rowley

Embrace Lancaster University, Robert Crouchley

gMan Kings College London, Mark Hedges

MEGStream Aston University, Ian Holliday

MILARQ Oxford University, Dr David M Shotton

OpenImpact Southampton University, Dr Leslie Carr

OpenPSIPearl Southampton University, John Darlington

PPCC York University, Tom Smith

RDSPress Coventry University, David Morris

SERPent University College London, Inst. of Child Health, Dr Tito Castillo

vizTweets City University London, Dr Jason Dykes

WattNames Heriot-Watt University, Roger Rist

http://code.google.com/p/vreri/

All chemicals and apparatus tagged with an RFID tag

VRERI - AMI

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A prototype of a natural user interface system that allows bench scientists to interact with their experimental information at the fumehood, using innovative modes of communication appropriate to the lab setting, focusing on voice recognition, touch-screens and laser keyboards.

The Ami experiment selection screen

Log in using ID badge (Touch-A-Tag RFID reader)

The Ami event log screen

http://amiproject.wordpress.com

VRERI - BlogMyData

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Allows environmental scientists to visually and interactively explore large datasets, then create notes and annotations about the data.

www.rdg.ac.uk/godiva2

+ =blogs.chem.soton.ac.uk

@Keith: What do you

think is going on here?

@Tom: Looks like a bug

in the model.

@Harry: Could be a bad

observation. I’ll overlay

the obs database.www.blogmydata.org

Research Tools

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Challenges

– Embedding

• Tools have been developed but need to be embedded within institutions. Many used by small groups but their use has not spread across domains, or within institutions. This is particularly relevant to researchers.

– Usability

• Users often have different levels of expertise so it's important that these tools are designed so that they are easy enough to use for most users, but also powerful enough for more advanced users.

Solutions

– Improved support of available tools. Better awareness of tools available. Ensure tools are easy to use. Encourage embedding of these tools within institutions.

Research Tools – first call

CamELS

– Improve the adoption of ELNs within Chemistry Dept of Cambridge and Southampton.

Increasing interoperability between Corpus Tools

– Explore ways of linking different corpus query tools so that users can investigate aspects of the same data in a variety of ways.

e-Health GATEway to the Clouds

– Establish a cloud-based VRE on the White Rose Grid to support e-health records research

HISTORE

– Developing training modules to encourage and support the use of online historical research tools within VREs

INSPIRES

– Using visualisation environments and tools to find cross-disciplinary connections between researchers and projects.

SLRGuide

– Establish the requirements for, and develop a cloud based collaborative tool to support, the systematic literature review process

TEXTUS

– Developing an open source platform that helps researchers and students to collaborate around and work with collections of digitised public domain texts

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Research Tools – second call

Emerging tools

– BatMobile

• Developing an App to take transformed ultrasound signals from an external mic to help identify and map the UK’s bat population

– Kinecting up the past

• Exploring the research benefits, use, and disruptive nature of Microsoft’s Kinect controller to capture environments and artefacts in 3-dimensions

– COSMOS

• Developing a VRE around an information collection, archival and analysis engine, which harvests freely available socially significant open data (from social network sites, blogs, micro-blogs, RSS feeds and Open Data (e.g. crime rates)), and analyses the harvested dataset to detect community tension and cohesion indicators.

– Twitter analysis workbench development

• Developing existing workbench (social media analysis of large datasets), integrating a range of new tools and migrating it to a fully cloud-based infrastructure 

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Research Tools – second call

Facilitating research communications

– COMTAX

• Develop and establish a community-driven curation process among practising taxonomists. The project will combine recommending new texts to users with an online verification process in order to engage the biodiversity community in collaborative taxonomic database curation.

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Research Tools – second call

Develop sustainable and open vocabularies for research and information management

– SOVARR

• The Shared Open Vocabulary for Audio Research and Retrieval (SOVARR) project aims to investigate the benefits of using sustainable and shared vocabularies in audio research communities, what are the primary needs of researchers, and what are the main barriers to the uptake of shared vocabularies.

– EnviLOD

• Developing semantic annotation tools that tackle the problem of Linked Open Data vocabulary enrichment, interlinking, and adoption in the domain of environmental science. Developing an easy to use a semantic search service.

– SKOS-HASSET

• Extending the use of social science thesauri by improving its online presence and testing its automated indexing capacity.

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Resources

Programme Websites

– http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_research.aspx

– http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre

– http://code.google.com/p/vreri/

VRE Synthesis

– http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_research/researchtools/VRE-Synthesis.aspx

VRE Infokit

– http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/vre/

VRE Knowledgebase

– http://misc.jisc.ac.uk/vre/ 20/11/2013 slide 19

© Jisc 2013

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