JISC

JISC supports UK post-16 & higher education and research by providing leadership in the use of Information and Communications Technology in support of learning, teaching, research and administration. JISC is funded by all the UK post-16 and higher education funding councils.

Membership and remit

The JISC Support of Research (JSR) committee membership includes representatives from the National e-Science Centre and each of the UK Research Councils: the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC).

In addition, observers from the British Library, the Research Information Network, SURF (JISC’s counterpart in the Netherlands), UKOLN and UKERNA attend committee meetings.

JSR supports the research community by funding technical development and advisory services. The representative nature of the committee and its strong links with the other research bodies ensure that these activities remain relevant to the research community.

JISC Support of Research (JSR) committee

e-Infrastructure

JISC’s e-Infrastructure programme follows the five-year investment in UK e-science and builds on work supported by the JISC Support of Research committee, the e-Science Core programme and the recommendations of the OST e-Infrastructure Roadmap initiative. e-Infrastructure embraces and integrates networks, grids, data centres and collaborative environments.

The programme aims to work with a wide range of partners and services, including the Research Councils, National Grid Service, Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK, the Digital Curation Centre, National Centre for Text Mining and a number of community projects to enhance current technologies and establish sustainable communities of use across four main areas:

1. Community engagement and support
2. e-Infrastructure security
3. Grid services and tools
4. Knowledge organisation and semantic services

The programme seeks to broaden e-infrastructure take-up, increasing capability, making the grid and grid software easier to use, and easing data retrieval, processing and archiving.

e-Infrastructure programme

Security and access management

Robust authentication and authorisation services are required for staff and students accessing datasets and other sources of electronic information. The JISC Support of Research committee is funding activities to ensure that the different approaches taken by the UK Access Management Federation and the UK grid community are mutually compatible and interoperable. To achieve this aim, it is working closely with the National Grid Service to fund pilot demonstrators of access management.

Another area of work is exploring secure grid-based access to JISC’s main dataset collections housed at the universities of Manchester (MIMAS) and Edinburgh (EDINA). This includes enabling researchers in the geospatial research community to access the Ordnance Survey datasets held at MIMAS.

Earlier work supported by JSR to develop core middleware for the new access management system is now being taken up by the JISC Integrated Information Environment committee. JSR will fund follow-on work under the e-Infrastructure programme to support access to a wider range of resources and to support the needs of virtual research environments.

National Grid Service

A computing grid is a set of middleware services running on top of the familiar network services that, together, constitute an e-infrastructure to support and enable multidisciplinary research and collaboration. The middleware services are so called because they lie between the network and the user applications. They facilitate secure and controlled access to many different types of resource – people, computers, data repositories and large-scale scientific facilities.

The National Grid Service is funded by the JISC Support of Research committee in collaboration with the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC). The NGS gives researchers access to high-performance computer clusters, two data clusters and the facilities of a growing number of partner sites. In addition, authorised users can access the UK’s national high-performance computing facilities through the same middleware services. Dedicated support staff help new users exploit all these resources and explore new forms of collaboration for their research.
The National Grid Service is part of a national e-infrastructure for research and innovation. By linking with parallel developments in Europe, Asia and the USA, it is enabling the development of global research grids.

National Grid Service

Semantic services and human factors

Knowledge technologies, based on semantically rich data and metadata, enable researchers, teachers and learners to extract new knowledge from the expanding range of digital resources, and to manage collections of resources and virtual research collaborations.

The UK has a strong presence in the development of knowledge technologies. Under the e-Infrastructure programme, the JISC Support of Research committee is continuing to support work on managing semantically rich data and developing semantic tools and services, which will be at the heart of the new semantic infrastructures emerging within the research and digital libraries communities.

JSR is also supporting work on human factors in grid environments. A computing grid for research must be easily usable by researchers so that they can work with a range of tools and streamline workflow. This means taking due consideration of human–computer interaction when designing intuitive grid working environments. A human factors audit across a number of e-science and JISC projects is capturing and documenting best practice and lessons learned to inform future requirements in system design and user interaction within research and grid environments.

Advanced text mining

Researchers are generating an overwhelming amount of electronic text and data, which are not easily assimilated outside, or even within, their subject areas. To manage this information overload, automated tools that can search large quantities of text to identify, manage, integrate and exploit knowledge are urgently needed. Advanced text mining achieves this by going beyond information retrieval and adding meaning to textual repositories, thus enabling researchers to discover hidden associations between entities and perhaps to generate scientific hypotheses.

The JISC Support of Research committee, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) are jointly funding a UK Text Mining Centre (NaCTeM) based at the University of Manchester.

The work of the centre focused initially on the biological sciences, but it is now extending to other domains. In particular, NaCTeM is demonstrating the applicability of text mining to the social sciences by supporting novel methods of information management and developing an automatic summarisation tool to locate relevant studies for input to a systematic review.

UK Text Mining Centre

Digital Curation Centre

Digital curation is all about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use; specifically, this means the active management and appraisal of data over the life cycle of scholarly and scientific materials.

Working with other practitioners, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) supports UK institutions to help ensure that the data they store, manage and preserve are enhanced with improved or advanced features or functionality and are available for continuing long-term use. The DCC provides a national focus for research and development into curation issues and promotes expertise and good practice, both national and international, for the management of all research outputs in digital format. The centre is hosted at the University of Edinburgh and is co-funded by the JISC Support of Research committee and the e-Science Core Programme.

Digital Curation Centre

Community engagement and support

Developments within e-research cannot be optimised fully unless researchers are given the opportunity to learn how to exploit and adapt available resources. The JISC Support of Research committee is funding community engagement programmes to support the development of appropriate skills among social scientists and arts and humanities researchers.

The aim of the programmes is to introduce researchers to the advantages of using grid-enabled resources, e-science tools and advanced applications through the provision of resources, workshops and training advice. To encourage the take-up of tools for distributed computing and virtual research, an e-Science Support Centre for the Arts and Humanities has been established jointly by JISC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with the aim of enabling researchers and lecturers to use grid and web technologies in their research and teaching practice.

The JISC Support of Research committee also supports the need to raise awareness of e-science within the UK by funding strategic events and reports for the community.

e-Research programme

VizNET: UK National Visualisation Network

Researchers across a broad spectrum of disciplines are generating ever-increasing amounts of complex data. The effective use of visualisation techniques has been shown to enable the meaningful and optimal analysis and presentation of this data.

The JISC Support of Research committee is funding VizNET, a collaboration between a number of visualisation centres in the UK, to share knowledge, communicate best practice between application domains and to provide training and support to researchers in the application of visualisation techniques.

VizNET is establishing a Visualisation Support Network, which will offer technical guidance to a wide range of users across the UK academic research community, helping new users to get started and experienced users with expert advice on difficult visualisation problems. By consolidating the strengths of major visualisation centres and groups across the country, VizNET aims to realise the full potential of emerging visualisation techniques and resources at both national and regional levels.

VizNET

Dark fibre and UKLight

The JISC Support of Research committee is procuring a testbed dark fibre network for the UK as the next phase of the UKLight project. It will connect up to five sites and provide a stable infrastructure for university groups and collaborating partners to support research projects. The testbed is due to be fully operational by March 2007.

Using funds from the Scientific Research Infrastructure Fund (SRIF), JSR oversaw the procurement of UKLight to support the development of optical networks and the applications that will use them. UKLight provides a ‘point of access’ in London with connections to peer facilities in the USA and the Netherlands to enable international collaboration. UK research groups can access the facility via extensions to the SuperJANET development network.

UKLight is now being integrated into the SuperJANET5 upgrade, and thus comes under the JISC Networking committee.

UKLight

Developing Virtual Research Environments

A Virtual Research Environment (VRE) harnesses online tools and network resources and technologies to enable researchers in widely dispersed locations to work collaboratively. The VRE Programme, supported by the JISC Support of Research committee, aims to build and deploy multidisciplinary VREs to demonstrate how researchers can be enabled to manage their increasingly complex tasks better.

JISC has recently been allocated a further £2 million to continue the activities of its VRE Programme. During the programme’s first phase, projects demonstrated how existing tools and frameworks could be used in VREs. The focus of VRE2 is to further develop and pilot such technologies by expanding into real-life research settings within UK higher education institutions and partner organisations. The aim will be to address the needs of cross-disciplinary, distributed research communities, as well as individual researchers, to evaluate the extent of change to working and research practices, and to identify and address any barriers to adoption.

Virtual Research Environment programme

Access Grid Support Centre

The Access Grid is a prototype for next-generation video conferencing. The aim is to provide technology that can support meetings between remote participants that are as effective as face-to-face meetings. This can only happen if participants are able to forget the technology and concentrate on the meeting itself.

The Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC), which is funded by the JISC Support of Research committee, ensures that the UK can fully realise the potential of the Access Grid as a tool for highly effective remote collaboration. The Centre is hosted by the University of Manchester and managed by UKERNA. It provides support for current and potential users, addressing topics such as procurement advice, help on AGSC services and general troubleshooting.

Following a recent user survey, the AGSC is launching a number of initiatives to improve the quality of sessions. These include a user-focused redesign of the website with online training movies, a new booking service, on-demand help from the centre to ensure meetings go smoothly, and automated testing functionality. 

Areas of overlap with other JISC committees

The JISC Support of Research committee cooperates closely with other JISC committees to inform its own work programme and to ensure that the developments it supports are taken up appropriately elsewhere. Work previously funded under JSR, which has recently moved to other committees for further development and deployment, includes:

• The Core Middleware Programme, which is being taken up by the JISC Integrated Information Environment committee (JIIE)
• UKLight, which is being incorporated into SuperJANET 5, the upgrade to the SuperJANET network, and now comes under JISC Networking

JSR keeps a watching brief on the following areas of work, supported by other JISC committees:

• The procurement of digital resources by the JISC Content Services committee
• Work on institutional repositories supported under JIIE
• Open source software and Open Access to research results also supported by JIIE