Economic and Social Research Council
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Workshop 4: Portals and VREs for Social Research

Organiser

Prof. Rob Crouchley, University of Lancaster, UK

UK activities in the deployment and use of Grid-based services and their delivery through portal frameworks has increased significantly over the last year. This is a popular example of how a Virtual Research Environment might be deployed using distributed services and resources with an easy-to-use interface. Rob Allan held a workshop "Portals and Portlets 2003" at NeSC 14-17/7/03 which was followed up with a workshop on "VREs, GridSphere and Portlets" at NeSC, 1-4/3/05 organised by Jason Novotny (LBL). Rob Crouchley and Rob Allan have contributed to JISC's formulation of a "UK Roadmap for a Virtual Research Environment" together with developers in the USA. Developers of projects in the recently-funded JISC VRE programme are now able to work together and have recently set up collaboration tools, including a Sakai portal site, e-mail list and Wiki to discuss technology and inter-operability issues. There is also significant overlap of the technologies used and services being deployed with e-Learning and digital information systems, JISC are therefore debating the creation of a Common Open Service Framework. Much of this activity is critical to creation of usable e-Social Science tools and application.

Computational and Data Grid technology is complemented in many of the VRE projects by the use of Access Grid as a collaborative multi-media vehicle for meetings, visualisation or other distributed activities. We will aim to show how these technologies can be combined in new and exciting applications.

This workshop will enable the groups involved to provide a mutual update of their progress and discuss technical issues and state-of-the-art developments including portal technology (WSRP and JSR-168) and Web and Grid services (WS-I, WSRF). We will use this meeting as a way of joining up the developers of the various groups and of joining the project managers to part of their user community. It will enable us to identify common technical themes and requirements and also provide an opportunity for social scientists to find out what is going on and to contribute to the growing debate.

Presentations:

  • Virtual Research Environments and e-Social Science, Rob Crouchley and Adrian Fish, University of Lancaster, UK; Robert Allan, Dharmesh Chohan, Xiao Dong Wang and Xiaobo Yang, CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, UK; Mark Baker, University of Portsmouth, UK and Matthew Dovey, University of Oxford, UK
  • An Introduction to Portal Technologies and Tools, Mark Baker, University of Portsmouth