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briefingpaper: VRE
Submitted by stuartdunn on Tue, 29/07/2008 - 12:11.
Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are infrastructural frameworks which bring together distributed tools and resources for a specific purpose, or for a specific group of users. This is a logical response to a number of developments in research practice over the last few years: the exponential increase in online (or potentially online) digital material, a shift to formal collaborative research on a larger scale, and the increased availability of online tools for manipulating and exploring datasets.
All three have changed the research environments in which academics work, and opened up new possibilities. In the arts and humanities, where there is a great variety of heterogeneous project-specific data, dispersed expertise, and an ever-increasing corpus of generic digital datasets (such as thesauri, lexica, lists of names etc), these possibilities are rapidly gaining in potential.
In their current form, VREs generally align along existing organizational and sub-organizational, lines. A VRE can serve a university, a faculty, a department, or (most commonly), an individual research enterprise, which may have a strong interdisciplinary or interinstitutional focus. Such organizational distinctions, however, are likely to fade as the technologies involved gain wider acceptance. VREs are scalable applications: the major distinction between a VRE and other grid-based applications lies in the former's academic, technological and organizational specificity. A VREs users, clients, tools and applications will be selected (or scripted) and embedded in the architecture to meet a specific research objective, or to address specific research questions, at the system design stage. A VRE can however, and indeed must (see below), interoperate with local and (inter)national infrastructures. For example, the Access Grid (AG) and National Grid Service (NGS) are not VREs in this sense, because they are distributed services with no common subject or community focus at a meaningful level, yet a VRE that does have such a focus may well exploit the AG, or subscribe to the NGS, for server space or processing power. This is a broad distinction, although a more nuanced and granular differentiation will surely become discernable as the technology, and its adoption, develops.
The terminology has to some extent been formalised by recognition by the JISC, which in 2004 announced a funding programme for demonstrator and proof of concept projects, 'Building Virtual Research Environments". Of 15 projects receiving funding, four are rooted in the AH research communities. In the predominantly analogue conventional AH research context, the JISCs definition of a VRE, and what it is expected to achieve, is significant: [VREs] help researchers in all disciplines manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research. A VRE will provide a framework of resources to support the underlying processes of research on both small and large scales, particularly for those disciplines which are not well catered for by the current infrastructure [emphasis added]. The potential benefits for the AH are therefore extremely clear. It is of further significance that JISC has recently issued and Invitation to Tender (ITT) for a e-Research Tools and Resources Interoperability Study to identify solutions to the issues of sustainability, standardisation and interoperability across the projects funded under the VRE Programme.
Uses in Research
Data deluge in the physical science communities has driven the e-Science agenda since the establishment of the Core Programme in 2000. In part, this agenda has led to the establishment of a number of VRE systems in the scientific community. As with every other aspect of of e-Science, the origins of the VRE concept in these disciplines reflect the volume and complexity of their data. VREs emerged in response to these communities move to more computational ways of working, rather than the developments in the technology which make them possible. The process of adoption of e-Science, including VREs, in the AH research disciplines is the subject of a number of current investigations and user surveys. The AHRCs e-Science Scoping Survey, funded under the ICT Strategy Projects Programme and directed by the Director of the AHDS, is the most significant development in the immediate term, with two other projects under the same scheme gathering knowledge on more general aspects of ICT usage. Oxfords Building a VRE for the Humanities project, funded under the JISC programme, is based on an intensive survey of local user needs, and will use the outcomes that exercise to plan its infrastructural activities. Although the picture will be clearer when these projects report in 2006 and 2007, there are some clear directions that VRE developments must take. Both early and sustained adoption must be similarly research-driven, although the research imperatives are very different. As noted above, AH research data is extremely heterogeneous in character. Linking these very varied resources together, and connecting them with more researchers in better/faster/more dynamic ways, is the grand challenge for the VRE in the A&H.
The strategic significance of VREs in AH research is discussed at greater length elsewhere . Fraser (2005) makes the critical point that any VRE must complement, and interoperate with, existing research infrastructures, policies and protocols. In the AH this must be the case on a technical level (as in the sciences), with appropriate standards, metadata and middleware to ensure that the datasets being researched are visible, accessible, searchable etc. for whatever tools the researchers are using, and that external online infrastructures can be plugged in where necessary. But it must also interoperate on an intellectual and academic level, relating to parallel work in the discipline. This is an area where a subtle distinction can be discerned between VREs for the hard sciences and those for the AH: whereas a scientific VRE will usually, although by no means always, be concerned with digital resources from a reasonably self-contained source the data produced by a large set of experimental equipment for example, or a series of genomic databases the primary data relevant to an AH VRE is likely to be far more heterogeneous.
VREs in Teaching
As already noted above, VREs need to be pluggable into existing infrastructure and services. This point is illustrated by the emergence of a number of VRE projects funded by the JISC programme, which make use of the Sakai framework, a technology developed as a teaching tool. Of particular relevance to the AH is the VRE in Political Discourse, 1500-1800 project (one of the four AH-driven projects referred to above), based at the Universities of Hull and East Anglia. This project highlights the relationship between VREs and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), which has hitherto been understood in terms of a distinction between many-to-many (VRE) and one-to-many (VLE) users. However, the Political Discourse project shows that this relationship is more complex. Using Sakai open-source software, which is primarily a set of CMS-based learning support tools, the project facilitates managed access by its users to the Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) collections, as well as the Dictionary of National Biography, in support of an MA programme. Such overlaps between VRE and VLA core structures are likely to become greater and more complex as more AH users adopt the technologies involved.
Further examples
Two other AH-related VRE projects funded under the JISC VRE programme constitute the main thrust of activity in this area. The Building a VRE for the Humanities project at the University of Oxford is focusing on the establishment of a set of priorities for e-Infrastructure within the Universitys Humanities Division. The emphasis here is on building a reusable set of protocols and tools which will be adaptable to other humanities faculties elsewhere. This is an important part of the user requirements analysis referred to above: the project is conducting a detailed survey and analysis of a wide range of Oxford Humanities research with ICT content and links to related research activities nationally and internationally, with a view to identifying common needs, methods and objectives; the final phase of the project will be devoted to the construction of a small number of prototypes or demonstrators, together with further user evaluation. It also highlights the more general point that, to be effective, a VRE needs to be firmly embedded in existing institutional frameworks, and led by the needs of users.
The Silchester Roman Town VRE project is built within the large archaeological excavation of that name in east Hampshire, England. The emphasis of this project is on the rapid acquisition of large quantities of data during the six-week summer excavation period using portable digitisation hardware, and its transfer, via an onsite wireless network, to an online database system. This system, the so-called Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB) is in turn accessible to a range of subject experts who are geographically dispersed around the UK. The system brings significant savings in the time taken to input and process the data, and also facilitates, via a bespoke online conferencing system (OGHAM Online Geoarchaeological Matrix) a much streamlined, and recordable, research discourse about the data once it has been digitised and stored.
Bibliography and links
Dunn, S. and A. Dunning 2005: AHRC Research Centres and the use of ICT, http://www.ahrcict.rdg.ac.uk/info/centres_projects
Fraser, M. 2005: Virtual Research Environments: Overview and Activity. Ariadne 44, July 2005
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_vre
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience; Hey, T. and A. Trefethen, 2003: The data deluge: an e-Science perspective, in Berman, F., G. Fox and T. Hey eds, Grid Computing, John Wiley Sons Ltd.
http://www.ahrcict.rdg.ac.uk/strategy_projects
Anderson, S., Dunn, S. and Hughes, L. 2005: VREs in the Arts and Humanities, Proceedings of the All Hands Meeting 2005, http://www.allhands.org.uk/2005/proceedings/
Sakai VRE for Education Research, University of Cambridge; Sakai VRE Portal Demonstrator, Lancaster University and VRE for the History of Political Discourse 1500-1800, University of Hull.
IPR. This raises complex IPR and licencing issues which VRE projects need to address.
http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/
http://www.silchester.rdg.ac.uk/vre
This briefing paper was written for AHeSSC, the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre. It is published here with permission from AHeSSC.
