Data Use - Virtual Research Environments
From GRDI2020
This is a GRDI challenge; return to Main Page with all the challenges and recommendations
Contents |
Introduction
JISC defines VREs "as a set of online tools and other network resources and technologies interoperating with each other to support or enhance the processes of a wide range of research practitioners within and across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. VREs go beyond providing researchers with easy access to data, applications and computational resources; instead they facilitate mobile and distributed researchers, research teams and communities in conducting activities, such a shared problem-solving and shared experimentation. A key characteristic of a VRE, therefore, 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."
While still young, VRE's are emerging in various contexts and disciplines. Across those heterogeneous origins, there are some clear trends in terms of foreseen solutions. The first and foremost trend is to move away from grand monolithic environment and allow for the inclusion of tools and services users already deploy and use for their everyday research activities. Such attempts are generally linked to recent development to web-oriented architectures, the move away from ‘heavy’ service-oriented architectures.
Next to such changes in the reference architectures, the information objects across data infrastructures for VRE’s have also experienced a redefinition. It is time to move to the concept of a social VRE, i.e. one that incorporates the exchange and reuse of research objects from in everyday research. Producers of research objects are also consumers, and the community takes care of development and preservation of the research objects. The principle of research objects has been developed by the JISC-funded MyExperiment platform, which is a repository to share and exchange research objects in the form of workflows. Research objects contain more than just the data. They contain meaningful links to other research objects as well as enhancements such as provenance records as well as annotations, etc. The recognition that not data but research object lie at the heart of the interaction of the user with ‘content’ is one the most important recent trends in the development of VRE’s. This means that one proposed approach of how to build VRE’s needs to be the development of research objects.
10-year vision
VREs are a common practice in disciplinary and inter-disciplinary collaboration. Multiple VREs exist inside an application allowing smaller sets of groups to collaborate. Furthermore VREs are integrated in other e-Infrastructure schemes such as the Virtual Organisation one of the Grid e-Infrastructures, enabling fine-tuned and low-level interactions among groups of users. Further tools and personalised portals are available, and administrators can dynamically add or remove resources and users from different applications.
State of the art
- what is available today? - discuss related areas of where the topic is relevant today and is being implemented
Challenges and Recommendations
Data infrastructures remain on a generic level and may support multiple disciplinary Virtual Research Environments. Some VREs may be very tech-savvy and will implement their scientific workflows directly on top of whatever APIs a data infrastructure provides. Others may be more high-level and work in point-and-click environments that are further detached from the data infrastructure APIs.
The main organisational issues lie on the relation of VREs with the e-Infrastructure resources and services, as well as other structures such as Virtual Organisations and the corresponding middleware. Such issues include ownership, control, and in general authority of the different structures and roles included in a VRE.
The following recommendations identified during the workshop aim to ensure the interaction between data infrastructures and VREs, as well as adequate data management practices within the communities, thus being directly or indirectly relevant to VREs.
