JISC

This project will enable enhanced data and application sharing between communities that are already using separate VREs. A new VRE Framework will be created through the integration of the Portal Access Grid (PAG) into and joining together existing VREs, which are based on JSR-168 standard portal environments such as Sakai.

Many research communities already utilise portals as an environment in which to collaborate; however, this project will allow users to bridge between individual portals and thus enable cross-portal collaboration. This enhanced and broadened interoperability will use existing tools to enable completely novel functionality beyond the scope of most existing VREs.

The project will address two significant challenges in realising this goal: the need for simple, intuitive user interfaces to allow this cross-portal interoperability to be accessible and the need to retain a high level of security by default.
As a test case, this project will engage two related but separate research communities: the National Centre for e-Social Science and the National Centre for Research Methods each of which use their own collaboration environment. We will use the outputs of this project to enable these two communities to share data and applications and thus enhance and extend collaboration between them.