A CLARIAH WP3 Virtual Research Environment

Introduction

The CLARIAH WP3 VRE aims to offer an environment that integrates many of the tools and services that were and are developed and supported in the CLARIN NL and CLARIAH (WP3) projects. Thus the VRE should overcome the fragmentation that now exists which forces the researchers to accept a different environment for every tool and service they want to use.

Next to integrating existing services, the VRE should also facilitate more easily repeatable research workflow by maintaining a solid data administration (provenance) that tracks the in and export of data and its processing.

The basis of the WP3 VRE is a largely general user environment not very specific for a particular discipline; discipline specific aspects are the supported (meta) data formats, the integrated services, including visualizations and the policies for in and exporting data from external repositories.

Demonstration

Want to run the VRE locally? See:

• technical readme
• demo readme

User Perspective

Ideally the VRE addresses different types of fragmentation and usage comfort issues.

1. fragmentation wrt. to location; services and tools are offered at different sites, which does not have to be detrimental, but should be made invisible to the user.
2. fragmentation wrt. user interfaces (UI); users have to adapt to different conventions how to control applications
3. fragmentation wrt having to manage different workflows; i.e. users are required to manage different sets of resources and results, one for every platform again.

Not all of these types of fragmentation can be addressed in equal measure.

The term VRE, although used already for some years, suffers from much vagueness and some deflation wrt. expected functionality. A VRE overlaps with web sites and platforms that go under the name of ‘portal’ and ‘collaboration platform’

For the VRE the difference with a Portal’s web-only approach is that the VRE will host actual data and allow upload and integration of new data and services. A collaboration platform can be actually anything as long as it has broad social networking facilities, which is not essential for our vision of a VRE, except for facilitating sharing of data and derived information.

Our vision for the VRE’s portal aspect is that of an environment providing a single point of entry for as many LT services as makes sense, and offering these in an integrated environment where possible. So the VRE is far more than a portal, and its portal aspects are relatively easy to implement by allowing access to a service and data catalogue as CLAPOP, the Dutch CLARIN Portal.

We also see a strong need for tracking of data workflow for reproducibility and verifiability. The added burden of managing such an administration should be invisible for the user, and, this will help the user also better managing his research data.

Key usability aspects:

From a user perspective the VRE should be offering the use of both local and web-based services. All services should be offered to the user as part of this single environment.

• Authentication for sharing of data using institutional identities in accord with CLARIN
• a user/project has dedicated workspace storage that can be shared with others
• easy import & export of data in and out of the VRE workspace
• automatic provenance logging of processed data
• overview/statistics of data in VRE workspace
• searching for data in the VRE workspace, both in metadata and content
• easy access to relevant tools. Relevance on the basis of data-type of selected resources
• comparisons of user data with standard corpora that are outside the VRE domain.
• frequently used resource processing offered via workflow ‘recipes’
• managing user profiles that include for instance user specific lexica for semantic search
• archiving of results via CLARIN/EUDAT services