JISC

Start date: 1 February 2005

End date: 31 October 2006

Funding programme: Virtual Research Environments programme (phase 1)

Project website: http://www.memetic-vre.net/

JISC theme(s): e-Research, Information environment

Context  

Meetings pervade the life of almost all researchers, and increasingly, these take the form of telephone and videoconferences amongst geographically dispersed colleagues. Supporting distributed meetings that are as productive as face-to-face meetings is a primary challenge for research and development in this field. This is the motivation for this proposal.  

The Access Grid™ (AG) is an open collaboration and resource management architecture that already provides many of the capabilities proposed by the JISC for a Virtual Research Environment (VRE). The overall aim of the project is to extend the functionality of the AG with advanced meeting support and information management tools that were developed and validated in the recent e-Science project, CoAKTinG. The project will also deploy this environment as a prototype VRE with end-user communities in order to test, evaluate and discover further user requirements. 

Our end-user partners represent a cross-section of communities interested in the potential of the proposed VRE to meet their needs. The areas represented by our partners include performance art, social science, middleware development and minority communities. These diverse users will help the project to evaluate the generic value of its capabilities. A phased deployment and evaluation process is planned, starting with the immediate project team as users, to address obvious usability and technical issues, before extending to the project partners who will subject the tools to a more formal evaluation.  

Aims and Objectives   

The specific objectives are to:

• Extend the AG's VRE infrastructure with new collaboration functionalities from the CoAKTinG project
• Provide a set of extensions to CoAKTinG tools to make their installation and administration simpler in both an AG and non-AG context
• Observe the use of and evaluate the improved VRE with end-user communities.

Project Methodology  

Formative and summative usability data will be gathered on the support provided for different research activities using a combination of qualitative analysis of multiple data sources, drawing on methodological expertise at the Social Informatics Cluster at the University of Edinburgh in naturalistic evaluation of collaboration tools in use and the Open University’s expertise in Human-Computer Interaction and usability evaluation. Data sources will include: meeting recordings and transcripts, logs of system usage and user feedback gathered from workshop discussions, and semi-structured interviews.  

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders  

Project outcomes will be fully disseminated within the worldwide AG community. AG Retreats, SC Global (http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/scglobal.html) and the Global Grid Forum's Workshop for Advanced Collaborative Environments are all appropriate vehicles for demonstrating our achievements and recruiting users from around the globe. Developments to the core AG software will be available to other users through the main AG CVS repository. Within the UK, the AG Support Centre will be able to disseminate the use of these technologies through its training programme and possibly through Quality Assurance tests to ensure that existing AG users reap the benefit of this project's outcomes. The project's work will, however, be of interest to the wider VRE/e-Science infrastructure and research community, and we have budgeted to disseminate at these events within the UK and abroad.  

Project Partners  

University of Manchester (http://www.manchester.ac.uk)

Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk/)

University of Southampton (http://www.soton.ac.uk/)

University of Edinburgh (http://www.ed.ac.uk/)

Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (http://www.omii.ac.uk/)

Practice as Research in Performance (http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/)

Minority Serving Institutions Consortium (http://www.msihpc.org/)

National Centre for e-Social Science (http://www.ncess.ac.uk/)

Welsh e-Science Centre (http://www.wesc.ac.uk/)