I had the opportunity to attend the 2007 JISC Conference in Birmingham. One of the sessions was on the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) chaired by Matthew Dovey. The VRE started in 2004 to move e-Science in the UK towards more user-centric tools. Incidentally, phase 1 still seemed to have a technology focus and built standalone solutions. Phase 2 of the VRE is just starting and is focused more on actual research practice with some interesting insights from phase 1. Two things I found interesting…
1. They are moving more towards the use of social networking tools for researcher communication, workflow and data discovery. A good example of this is myExperiment, social tagging for discovery versus curation.
2. They seem to have quite an “agile” looking development approach for phase 2.
Another session was on the e-Framework from a UK perspective. The session was also used to talk about enterprise architecture for educational institutions. Chris Greenslade from The Open Group presented on enterprise architecture and TOGAF. I think the JISC perspective is that domain modelling is an important part of enterprise architecture and this could work well with the e-Framework. For a while now, my point of view has been that the e-Framework components might compliment TOGAF artifacts. From what I hear TOGAF, and for that matter all enterprise frameworks, do not yet cover SOA contracts.