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JISC funded three Community Engagement projects to find out what inhibits and enables the use of e-infrastructure tools and services by researchers. They share a common aim with the JISC-funded Virtual Research Environment (VRE) projects which have developed infrastructures to meet researchers’ needs. The following, based on an article in JISC Inform, introduces the projects.

The UK needs a national e-infrastructure for research if it is to remain competitive in the global knowledge-based economy – that was one of the conclusions reached in 2004 by the government’s ‘Science and Investment Framework 2004-2014’. Since then, investment by JISC, the UK e-Science programme and others has put many elements of the e-infrastructure in place - a national grid service, tools to create VREs and tools to manage or visualise data, for example – but they are still not widely used by researchers.

The JISC-funded Community Engagement projects wanted to find out how best to encourage greater take up of e-infrastructure services and tools for research. One project, eUptake, has mapped the barriers to use; another, ENGAGE, has developed software to make the National Grid Service (NGS) and large-scale institutional computing resources more attractive to wider groups of researchers; and the third, e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models (eIUS) has looked at examples where e-infrastructure has been used successfully as part of the research process.

Success stories

Rana, an experimental biologist, is looking for genes that might be linked to human disease. She collaborates with Alex, a bioinformatician, and, using a number of e-research tools, they home in on some good candidate genes for further analysis in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken.

Linus, a geographer, wants to play SimCity for real to forecast the likely impacts of social policies and future health trends. He comes across the MoSeS project which has developed an infrastructure that can do what he wants. He registers to use the NGS, accesses census data and is able to project the future distribution of illness in Bradford.

These mini-scenarios give a taste of the use cases developed by eIUS. ’We’ve employed use case scenarios, in effect story-telling and videos, to demonstrate that e-infrastructure use can now be considered normal within many subject areas,’ says Dr Michael Fraser from Oxford University Computing Services who leads the project. The processes successful adopters of e-infrastructure went through can be used to inspire others, particularly those who feel they should be using advanced ICT but can’t quite see how to incorporate it into their own research processes.

eIUS has produced more than 15 use cases, ten of them on video, which chart the successful use of advanced ICT for research across a broad range of disciplines.

Barriers

Lack of awareness: ‘People don’t always know what is available locally, nationally and possibly regionally.’

Concern about sustainability: ‘You’re working with tools that come out of research rather than out of a software factory. It’s difficult to figure out what the risk is before you start.’

Communication: ‘I’m not an e-scientist. People talk different languages and you’ve got to understand what different people are doing to see how they can merge together.’

These are examples of barriers to the adoption of e-infrastructure identified by the eUptake project, which interviewed researchers, intermediaries such as research computing services and national or regional service providers.

The project has created a database of barriers, backed up by evidence from the interviews, together with enablers that could be adopted to overcome the barriers. ‘We wanted to provide an evidence base for targeted interventions and strategic planning to enable greater uptake of e-research across all disciplines,’ says Professor Rob Procter from the National Centre for e-Social Science at Manchester University, who led the project.

Solutions

Climate modelling – making a climate system model, Genie, easy to use over the NGS for post-graduate teaching and even public use.

Planning radiotherapy treatment – taking the output of a project in Cardiff to increase the accuracy and effectiveness of radiotherapy treatment and making it securely available on the NGS.

Image processing for ancient documents – adapting image-processing tools developed to study ancient manuscripts and making them available to different communities of researchers.

These are three of 14 projects being taken forward by ENGAGE to make solutions developed under specialist projects available for a wider and less specialist user base. The projects were chosen with input from the interviews conducted by eIUS and eUptake and by ENGAGE itself.

“We heard from many researchers who were excited by the possibilities of using e-Infrastructure for their research,” says Neil Chue Hong from OMII-UK who leads the project, ’and we wanted to show them that it was possible to overcome the perceived issues.”’

Virtual Research Environments

The Community Engagement projects have many common interests with the JISC-funded VRE projects. Both share an aim of developing infrastructures that serve researchers’ needs.

The image processing project being taken forward by ENGAGE, for example, is further developing software from the VRE project on the Study of Documents and Manuscripts (SDM).

The second phase of VRE projects, which have recently concluded, are also showing how some of the barriers highlighted by eUptake can be surmounted. Two of the projects have employed ethnographers to chart research processes and so explore how the gap between research user and software designer can be bridged, addressing the communication and other barriers.

The VRE programme focuses on developing a framework, populated with online tools and resources, to enable researchers to collaborate and share resources over the internet. ‘Sometimes several of the simplest solutions enable you to break through a large barrier and allow researchers to do more or faster work. Getting the right tools and resources and people to work together is the real challenge,’ says Frederique van Till, JISC VRE programme manager.

The Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology (VERA) project, for example, found that installing a wireless network at the Silchester archaeological dig enabled the sharing of data and experiences with a wide and varied audience, proving that it’s not always high end technology that delivers the greatest impact.

Breaking down barriers will be an even more significant part of the third phase of the VRE programme, which is just beginning and aims to embed VREs in institutions and link them up with national infrastructure and resources.

Further information

Community Engagement projects

Virtual Research Environment Programme phase 2

Virtural Research Environments briefing paper

A full list of the recently awarded VRE3 projects