Research programme: Research tools
The aim of this strand is to ensure the research community is fully informed of the potential that IT and IT infrastructure can offer the research process. Researchers will benefit through access to compute facilities and tools for research that facilitate collaboration and communication, improve research processes and enable new research findings.
The strand builds on work undertaken by the Virtual research environment (VRE) and Research infrastructures programmes. The VRE programme funded work to help researchers from all disciplines to work collaboratively by managing the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research on both small and large scales. VREs take a coherent approach to joining up tools to serve particular or generic aspects of the research lifecycle.
The Research infrastructure programme supported development and embedding of the underlying infrastructure that enables the use of research tools. A particular focus was grid and cloud computing and the Research tools strand will continue some of these activities.
The plan for this strand is to fund the following activities from 2011 to 2012:
-
National Grid Service as it moves to a self-sustaining service
- Exploiting infrastructure for research
- distributed computing capability
- cloud
- visualisation
- data mining
- semantic services
- linked data
- geospatial
- Virtual Laboratory of the Future
- hybrid environments/reality
- mobile interfaces
- new interaction models
- Research collaboration and communications
- bridging institutions, research groups, nations, and citizen science/scholarly comms
- disseminating research/research impact within the research community/scholarly comms
- public outreach