JISC

JISC is working with partner organisations to provide support for all phases of the research process.

Virtual research environments are enabling researchers and academics to manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research. The VRE programme has this year supported four new projects looking at how Web 2.0 technologies can support researchers in collaborating and sharing resources.

• The Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW) project captures formal and informal information from research events through social software, semantic technologies and recording tools. This approach helps to inform non-participants of key events as well as enriching participants’ experience.

• The Study of Documents and Manuscripts project was extended in 2007 to address the wider needs of documentary and manuscript scholars working in the humanities. The project will test the degree to which the VRE tools can be re-used by other disciplines.

• myExperiment is a community social network, a market place, a platform for launching workflows and a gateway to other publishing environments. The myExperiment Virtual Research Environment, completed this year, enables individuals and research communities to share digital items associated with research and, in particular, scientific workflows. It connects scientists in a virtual community who may otherwise be disconnected, enabling them to use and repurpose experiments, to reduce time-to-experiment, share expertise and avoid reinvention.

• VERA – Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology project builds on the successful JISC VRE 1 project, Silchester Roman Town: a Virtual Research Environment for Archeaology. The rich and complex finds from the excavations at Slichester provide the material to populate the research environment, and a working site to investigate the use of advanced Information Technology in an archaeological context.. Digital pens and memo pads have been used this year for the first time to capture the rich and complex finds, speeding up the time from dig to published research.

Two videos were released in the last year which explained how projects from the first phase of the VRE programme brought researchers together to tackle complex research questions in a wide range of subject areas. Projects highlighted in the videos showed how researchers in the materials sciences, for example, were able to share results in real time with other remote teams of specialists; how dancers have been performing in remote environments; how groups of historians have been ‘meeting’ remotely and collaborating across more than a dozen institutions, and so on.

JISC has continued to enable arts and humanities researchers to apply advanced ICT technologies to the development of their research. JISC joined forces with the Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) ICT in Arts and Humanities Research programme and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to fund a joint Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative. Seven major research projects in a wide range of arts and humanities subjects have been funded under the initiative. JISC has also published a Briefing Paper giving researchers an overview of the activities its supports of relevance to the arts and humanities.

Podcast The importance of e-Science to the arts and humanities 
AHRC’s David Robey on this area of work (Duration 11:54)
 

The University of Essex is leading the JANET Aurora project to develop new network technologies for transferring vast amounts of data at even higher speeds in the future. Three universities – Cambridge, Essex and University College London -are being linked with 350km of high quality optical fibre to form an online distributed research environment. The fibre is unlit, providing a ‘dark fibre’ facility for collaborative design and testing of all-optical switches and new network architectures. Other groups will be able to use the facility by connecting via JANET Lightpath, with its connection to Europe and North America through the GEANT 2 European network. JANET Aurora is putting the UK at the forefront of network research.

In September 2007 JISC sponsored the sixth e-Science All Hands meeting, a forum for researchers, developers and users across all disciplines to discuss and demonstrate a broad range of e-Science projects. Among the highlights at this year’s meeting were the use of virtual globes - such as Google Earth - to visualise environmental data, using e-Science techniques to enable environmental scientists to devise strategies to combat pollution, and exploring how e-Science can support the delivery of healthcare at home using personal monitors.

Two reports addressing the issues and concerns surrounding identity management were published in November 2007. The reports Identity Project Report and the e-Infrastructure Security: Levels and Assurance report.

These publications investigated the current situation in UK higher education institutions as far as identity management is concerned and how levels of assurance can be defined, agreed and then applied to different resources.

Podcast Managing identity in education 
JISC programme manager James Farnhill (Duration: 12:43)

Article on this work: Identity matters in education (Inform 21)

In an environment in which user needs are changing from sourcing data to managing it, data curation presents significant challenges. Three cross-cutting issues which the sector needs to address emerged from discussions at the Innovation Forum held in Keele in June: intellectual property rights, training and infrastructure.

Examples of JISC’s work which address these issues were showcased at the forum, including the Web2rights project, the Data Audit Framework Development project and the a new study funded jointly by the Research Information Network, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and JISC which will explore the current practice for ensuring the quality of data.

Read the final report from the JISC Innovation Form 2008