CREW

Yesterday I watched an interesting and illuminating talk hosted on ReDReSS by Chuck Severance of the Sakai Foundation. He talked about the portal/portlet standard JSR168 and other standards relevant to us, such as RDF and JSR170, cloud services and the future of Sakai (we here in Manchester are probably going to use Sakai for our VRE).

Chuck provides some interesting views on current web2.0 technologies like Flickr and iGoogle. We on CREW need to be aware of this stuff, especially when we consider how we can contribute to the “functionality mashup”.

50 minutes of my life well spent.

Watch it here: Functionality Mashup video

Our old website was a bit rubbish and didn’t accurately reflect all of our activities on CREW. Since March 2007 our activities have included:

• “User Days” with Institute of Health Sciences (2 August 2007), Scientific User Groups (31 August 2007) and Intute (4 October 2007). The sessions included an introduction to project and the technologies involved followed by interactive sessions designed to understand the user’s needs and requirements. A report based on user needs will be published here soon.
• Supporting the first user event – the “Making good applications to the NIHR Research for Patient Benefit scheme” workshop (17 September 2007) for the Institute of Health Sciences. The event can be seen in the first release of the CREW software (note that this is an early version and the session also suffered some technical audio and video issues!).
• Mike Daw talked about “Enhancing the Value of Collaborative Research Events through Virtual Research Environments” in the VRE Workshop at the UK e-Science 2007 All Hands Meeting.
• Weekly developer meetings via the Access Grid, IRC or Skype and monthly project meetings via the Access Grid.
• Lots of coding in Java and ActionScript!

The functional requirements are the architecture are still being worked on by the development team – more details will be published when they have matured, although you can see our current thinking about this and other work in progress at our Wiki.

We are also looking at collaboration with other JISC projects where interests overlap:

• e-Dance in the recording of events.
• RACE for the storage of recordings and the meta data used to describe the recordings.
• STSAR Project for the annotation of event by users.

The blog will be regularly updated as the project progresses.