The document discusses Virtual Research Environments (VREs), which consist of online tools and resources that promote collaboration among researchers. It outlines various projects, tools, and frameworks designed to facilitate collaborative research across institutions, focusing on user needs and interoperability. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of embedding these tools in institutions and improving usability for diverse user expertise levels.

1. VREs and Research Tools
Supporting collaborative research
Christopher Brown
Programme Manager
21/11/2013
Venue Name: Go to 'View' menu > 'Header and Footer' to change
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2. 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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3. VRE Programme Timeline
VLE approach to Research
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre.aspx
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 Projects
4 FoF Projects
14 RI Projects
VRE
Research Tools. Wider focus. Tools to
enable collaboration, exploit einfrastructure and help to build
communities within and across domains
15 Projects
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_research.aspx
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4. VRE2 Demonstrators
4 demonstrators
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
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5. VRE2 - Study of Documents and Manuscripts
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6. VRE2 - myExperiment
myExperiment makes it easy to find, use and share scientific workflows
and other Research Objects, and to build communities.
 “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 has over 7500 members, 300 groups, 2500 workflows, 600 files and 300
packs*
www.myexperiment.org
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* As of 15/11/2013
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7. VRE3 Projects
Strand 1 - VRE Tools
- Video Conversion on PAG
Strand 3 - VRE Interoperability
LinkSphere Reading
Manchester
Text VRE KCL
Virtual Research Integration
Collaboration (VRIC)
Southampton
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
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Institutional Scholarly comms &
publication sharing Cambridge
 16/05/2011 | Slide 7
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8. VRE3 - BRAIN
Expertise Search Tool (Stand-alone version)
www.project-brain.org
Researcher Matching Tool (Online version)
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9. VRE3 - IBBRE
 A VRE to support cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration in internetbased 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/
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10. VRE3 - VRE-CI
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.
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11. VRERI – Rapid Innovation
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/
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12. VRERI - AMI
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.
Log in using ID badge
(Touch-A-Tag RFID reader)
The Ami experiment selection screen
All chemicals and apparatus
tagged with an RFID tag
http://amiproject.wordpress.com
The Ami event log screen
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13. VRERI - BlogMyData
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
www.blogmydata.org
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14. Research Tools
 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.
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15. 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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16. 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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17. 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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18. 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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19. 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/VRESynthesis.aspx
 VRE Infokit
– http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/vre/
 VRE Knowledgebase
– http://misc.jisc.ac.uk/vre/
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20. © Jisc 2013
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Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK
England & Wales Licence.
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