JISC

Start date: 1 November 2004

End date: 31 October 2006

Funding programme: Virtual Research Environments programme (phase 1)

Project website: http://www.core.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

The Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment (CORE) is a 24-month project that will develop and deploy a Web services based Virtual Research Environment (VRE) demonstrator; to enable researches to design experiments collaboratively, collect the results and disseminate the findings. In the context of orthopaedics, experiments can be multi-centred clinical trials that involve analysis of large data sets, the documentation needs to be written collaboratively and the experiments will need to be managed and co-ordinated for a geographically disperse set of researchers. The CORE project will develop a Grid/Web services based VRE demonstrator for the benefit of the Higher Education and Further Education communities.  

Aims and Objectives   

The project aims to provide integrated computer support across the research and educational cycles, because these activities are intrinsically coupled as a part of the requirements of the surgeon’s Continuing Professional Development.   The CORE will allow surgeons to: create technical material (including non research material for education), analyse data (from their own trials or data entered from journals), investigate hypotheses (from their own work or as meta or thematic reviews), discuss the finding from their or others work, and prepare and submit articles for review.  

The specific objectives are to:

• Map the Requirements Specification which will inform the development of the VRE demonstrator.
• Develop a Service Oriented Architecture to support CORE.
• Develop a demonstrator incorporating a number of services that will allow surgeons to create, manage and discuss their clinical trials (experiments).
• Report on the evaluation process and results.

Project Methodology  

An engineering approach to developing software of specify, design, build and evaluate will be untaken.  The aim is to ascertain the wider issues and requirements involved with providing Web-services that relate to the storage, access, use and re-use, of research data in repositories, and information from digital libraries and its dissemination. The CORE VRE will take a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. The CORE services will be developed using agreed standards such as SOAP and WSDL. These services are generic in nature and may apply to many disciplines. The demonstrator will implement the services developed and embed them into the Web-services infrastructure. Standard user evaluation methods will be employed to focus upon the usability of the demonstrator by non-technical users (e.g., can it be used simply and effectively?).

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

Project Partners  

None.