Chris Awre – VRE and eReSS
eReSS is the ‘eResearch Specifications and Standards’ which is an observatory type project that set out to capture the use of standards in the JISC VRE Programme, and advising projects on standards usage.
There is a eReSS wiki (introduction to this at http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/eress_wiki_intro.html, but seems to be down at the moment)
The project covers Technical standards, Community standards, and looks at open/closed standards, and the issues around using various standards.
The Future of VREs
(just missed who the speaker was – possibly Mark Baker?)
VREs offer:
- Customised user interfaces
- Focussed entry point
- Personalised services
- Role based security
- access to information and services, hiding the underlying complexity
- Provides a supported working environment
- use for finding, sharing and disseminating information
- Facilitates collaboration across institutional boundaries
There are now a wide variety of portals – both on the open web (iGoogle, Twine, etc.) and institutional frameworks (e.g. Sakai)
The VRE provides a web-based portal where seientists/engineers can login and access various tools
If using a portal framework, potentially applications and services have to be ported to the system
If not using a formal Portal Framework, then more or less all the infrastructure, services and utilities need to be designed and implemented from scratch
Many attempts to embed web based applications into portals is that they end up forking software to put them in a ‘portlet’.
‘Bridges’ are a way around this – bridges allow you to consume a normal web application – in the VERA project they have developed the Recycle Bridge (vera.rdg.ac.uk/software) allowing them to bring in web applications into a portal.
I have to admit I don’t really understand the approach the speaker is advocating. I find the idea that researchers want a a ‘supported working environment’ interesting – the speaker suggests that researchers want to buy into a ‘supported’ suite (however, do they care who supports it?), and I have to admit as we see the changes in thinking around VLEs/PLEs I would have thought a more personal approach would be where VREs are going to – researchers want to define their own environment, and what is needed is that you can plug insitutional tools , services or information sources into this environment (easily!).
Finally the speaker suggests that web based environments are only a stepping stone, and eventually these will be replaced by desktop based environments (essentially getting rid of the web ‘one-stop shop’)