OJAX++: Demonstrating the Next Generation of Virtual Research

The Electronic Library OJAX++: demonstrating the next generation of virtual research environments David Jeffery Judith Wusteman Article information: To cite this document: David Jeffery Judith Wusteman, (2012),"OJAX++: demonstrating the next generation of virtual research environments", The Electronic Library, Vol. 30 Iss 1 pp. 134 - 145 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02640471211204114 Downloaded on: 24 June 2016, At: 00:00 (PT) References: this document contains references to 21 other documents. To copy this document: [email protected] The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 311 times since 2012* Users who downloaded this article also downloaded: (2012),"An exhibition guiding system with enhanced interactive functions", The Electronic Library, Vol. 30 Iss 1 pp. 120-133 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02640471211204105 (2012),"E-government portals: a knowledge management study", The Electronic Library, Vol. 30 Iss 1 pp. 89-102 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02640471211204088 (2012),"Viable or vital? Evaluation of IM services from patrons' perspectives", The Electronic Library, Vol. 30 Iss 1 pp. 70-88 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02640471211204079

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EL 30,1 OJAX11 : demonstrating the next generation of virtual research environments 134 David Jeffery and Judith Wusteman UCD School of Information and Library Studies, University College Dublin, Received 23 November 2010 Accepted 11 February 2011 Dublin, Ireland

Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to introduce the OJAXþþ virtual research environment (VRE) and illustrate how it can enable researchers to organise and collaborate on their research in one place while using their own choice of popular web-based applications. Design/methodology/approach – Recent state-of-the-art reports have highlighted trends in best practice VRE design: the move towards lightweight, modular, Web 2.0 VRE frameworks, and the importance of interoperability and integration of third party applications in such frameworks. Findings – OJAXþþ is a practical demonstration of these trends. Practical implications – The OJAXþþ VRE is freely available under an open source licence. Social implications – The aim of VREs is to facilitate the research process and the OJAXþþ VRE illustrates an implementation of this goal. Originality/value – The OJAXþþ VRE demonstrates best practice in VRE design, as highlighted in recent state-of-the-art reports. Keywords Virtual research environment, VRE, E-research, Interoperability, OJAXþþ, Research, Open systems Paper type Case study

1. Introduction E-research is characterised by its collaborative, multi-disciplinary nature, the increasingly large volumes of data it processes and generates, and the sophisticated infrastructure required to support it. This new generation of research requires new Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT) tools and technologies to underpin it. Virtual research environments (VREs) are evolving to fit these requirements. The OJAXþþ VRE project[1] (September 2007-February 2011) is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and is based at the UCD School of Information and Library Studies, with the collaboration of the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics. The project aims to demonstrate how loosely-coupled Web 2.0 frameworks, enabling interoperability and integration of popular third party tools, can facilitate usable VREs and thus contribute to the support of e-Research. A VRE, called OJAXþþ, has been developed to demonstrate the importance of these trends and to explore best practice in VRE design. The resulting tool is freely available under an open source licence[1] (from The Electronic Library January 2011). In addition, the project is exploring the strategic and practical issues Vol. 30 No. 1, 2012 pp. 134-145 facing Ireland in relation to future VRE research, development and use. q Emerald Group Publishing Limited Among the motivators behind the OJAXþþ project is the hypothesis that the 0264-0473 DOI 10.1108/02640471211204114 momentum of academic research can benefit from adopting social web ingenuity and functionality. The social web and academic research both involve “harnessing OJAXþþ collective intelligence” (O’Reilly, 2005a), community and collaboration, the sharing of ideas and peer review. In addition, the generic requirements of the VRE, namely interoperability, modularity and compatibility (JISC, 2006), are reflected in the central tenets of Web 2.0: the provision of data and services that facilitate “remixing” with other data and services, via an “architecture of participation” (O’Reilly, 2005b). These parallel themes all point to the conclusion that integration and interoperability between 135 tools, systems and data sources need to be central themes in VRE research. In 2010, three international VRE state-of-the-art reports (Carusi and Reimer, 2010; Doove et al., 2010; SURFnet, 2009) were published and an international workshop on the same topic took place (Knowledge Exchange, 2010). These reports and workshop identified as central to VRE good practice, the adoption of lightweight, customisable frameworks and the integration of the user’s tool choice, thus justifying the approaches taken by the OJAXþþ project. This paper introduces the concept of VREs, and discusses the trends in best practice VRE design, illustrating the approach taken by the OJAXþþ VRE to implementing these design goals.

2. The VRE The definition of the virtual research environment, or VRE, is still evolving. The UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Virtual Research Environments Programme, widely identified as the leader in the field of VRE development, states that: The term VRE is now best thought of as shorthand for the tools and technologies needed by researchers to do their research, interact with other researchers (who may come from different disciplines, institutions or even countries) and to make use of resources and technical infrastructures available both locally and nationally (JISC, 2010). Given the wide scope of this definition, determining what is and what is not a VRE can be challenging. Some environments that could be identified by the above description are instead defined using the following terms: collaboratories, collaborative virtual environments, gateways, science gateways, portals, virtual organisations and cyber-environments (Carusi and Reimer, 2010; Voss and Procter, 2009). However, as

Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT) the concept of the VRE becomes more widely recognised, the tendency to describe every portal, gateway and digital library as a VRE needs to be guarded against. Whilst these applications may be central components of a VRE, the latter is more than a digital library, or even a portal or gateway to a range of digital libraries (Wusteman, 2009). A VRE should describe an environment in which research collaboration is facilitated, not just a resource to be used in research. Although not claiming to be comprehensive, the JISC VRE Landscape Study (Carusi and Reimer, 2010) provides one of the best current overviews of the VRE ﬁeld. It identiﬁes some of the potential functions covered by the range of VREs it surveys: . sharing of data; . support for communication within a team; . provision of access to tools, services or an infrastructure; . support for project management; EL . collaborative annotation of data; and 30,1 . analysis and processing of data.

3. Trends in VREs Depending on one’s definition, the VRE as a distinct field of research and development has been in existence since the early 2000’s[2]. It is still a fluid concept but some models 136 for future development and implementation are beginning to gain support (Carusi and Reimer, 2010; SURFnet, 2009; Knowledge Exchange, 2010; Doove et al., 2010). These include: . Adoption of lightweight, customisable, modular, often Web 2.0 frameworks. . Integration of the user’s choice of widely-used collaboration and research tools, rather than creation of tools for each VRE.

3.1 Light-weight modular frameworks The first systems that could be described as VREs followed the pattern of the time and were generally integrated, single service solutions. The tools within such monolithic VREs were either created as components of the VRE or the VRE was developed around a single existing piece of software, such as an all-encompassing institutional portal. More recently, however, the move has been towards “lightweight and customisable”, particularly Web 2.0 solutions (Carusi and Reimer, 2010). The VRE concept has evolved from the initial one-size-fits-all generic VRE (as latterly epitomised by Microsoft’s SharePoint (SURFnet, 2009)), through the discipline-specific VRE and, latterly, to a more nuanced model, that recognises both generic and specific aspects and where epistemic style and social organisation of a discipline may inform VRE design (Wouters, 2010). The JISC VRE Landscape report (Carusi and Reimer, 2010) identifies, as “potentially the most important trend” in VREs, the increasing focus on “providing general VRE frameworks that can be used to develop and host different VREs”. It proposes that such frameworks should provide core services and lists the following as examples of areas in which such services could exist: authentication and rights management; repositories; project planning, collaboration and communication. These frameworks should also facilitate “development or easy integration of modules for specific uses.”

Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT) SURFnet (2009) proposes a similar model. The OJAXþþ VRE demonstrates one potential implementation of such modular, lightweight customisable Web 2.0 solutions that allow easy integration and interoperability with other applications.

3.2 Integrating the user’s tool choice The temptation for software developers to reinvent the wheel is often overwhelming. The wish to create a “perfect” application for a perceived need can over-ride the option of adopting a good-enough, widely-supported and simpler solution. Commonly, such developments result in either a replication of existing software with very little added value or software which exhibits some added value but supports only a subset of the functionality of existing products. Academic-related software has appeared particularly prone to this syndrome. This perceived propensity was the initial inspiration for the OJAXþþ project in 2006. Thus, the aims of OJAXþþ include integration and interoperability of existing applications, thereby avoiding the creation OJAXþþ of yet more academic silos. By 2010, some, although far from a majority, of researchers have adopted social networking or collaboration tools, including blogs, wikis, slide-sharing services, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and so on (RIN, 2010)[3]. It would appear that, on the whole, these same researchers do not intend to give up their tools of choice in favour of VRE-specific alternatives, whether this request comes from institutions or 137 research-groups (SURFnet, 2009; Drenthe, 2010). As Doove et al. (2010) comment, “unlike office software, collaborative environments cannot be enforced”. They conclude that VREs should be developed as “open platforms that allow easy integration” of these popular tools of choice and “only develop competing solutions if there is a very good reason”. The sentiment is echoed by Carusi and Reimer (2010). This approach is gaining support: Wolff (2010) stresses that the “primary focus of a VRE should not be on providing new functionality but on integrating tools, functionality that [researchers] already use.” Moving away from an insistence that the perfect tool is even possible, the VRE research and development community is increasingly embracing the recognition that “little improvements rarely pay off” and that “there must be significant improvement for the user to make it worthwhile learning a new system” (Wouters, 2010). The importance of “going with the crowd” by choosing commonly used tools (Eckelmann, 2010) is gaining credence. Carusi and Reimer (2010) conclude that “VRE users need to be put into a position where they can create their own environments with tools and other resources that are relevant to their research.” OJAXþþ aims to achieve the best of both worlds: by allowing the use of external applications but integrating the activity streams of these applications. Thus, researchers are provided with a focus for their research activities and collaborations.

4. Choosing a suite of third-party applications Why might a research group wish to construct their own set of loosely-coupled tools instead of using the tools provided by a monolithic VRE? The potential benefits of building a tailored suite of applications are outlined below: . Better quality tools. It is unlikely that an academic VRE project, which aims to build a set of tools to perform a broad range of general functions, such as Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT) calendars, bookmarking, document sharing and so on, will be able to provide the quality, attention to detail and rich user experience of a dedicated third-party tool, which may have been developed commercially and at considerably greater cost. And yet, unsurprisingly, VRE users expect this standard of usability from such tools (Carusi and Reimer, 2010). . Well-tested tools. Many publicly available tools already enjoy widespread use, have been extensively tested by the user community and are thus less likely to suffer from bugs and usability issues. . Convenience. The chosen tools are those that the individual researcher, or research group, deem to be the most appropriate. Researchers can decide to switch tools if the focus of the project changes at a future point. . No technology lag. Web applications are constantly evolving. It is difficult for a tightly-coupled VRE to remain current with the latest technologies. There is EL considerable competition in the Web 2.0 space and commercial web applications 30,1 tend to be closer to the cutting edge. . Reduced duplication. If working with a monolithic VRE, researchers might need to duplicate content that they had created via third-party tools in order to make the content available to the VRE. The OJAXþþ approach avoids this duplication. 138 . Gentler learning curve. There is no need for a user to reinvent their research workflow to accommodate the VRE; the user may simply employ their existing choice of tools. . Motivation enhancer. The researcher has an enhanced stake in the VRE because they are responsible for choosing the tools. . Support for dynamic virtual teams. Some VREs are designed as permanent online environments. Others may be transitory. For example, a temporary research team may be formed, comprising groups and individual researchers from different institutions, to collaborate on a single project or research proposal. The team members could continue to work with familiar tools while still sharing data within the team with members using different tools. No time is wasted learning “foreign” tools. . Auxiliary benefits of using a popular tool. Many popular third-party tools themselves have third-party tools that plug into their application programming interface (API). Bookmarking services like Delicious and Diigo have plug-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer. The micro-blogging service Twitter has a number of applications available that enable postings from the desktop or from a mobile device. Developers create third-party applications because they are widely used. In most cases, components of a VRE will not be as widely used by the general public and are therefore unlikely to attract development of third-party applications.

Each of these benefits can significantly enhance the usability of a VRE. However, managing the data from a number of chosen third-party research tools can be difficult and may negatively impact usability because there is not the same level of tight integration between components that may be found in a monolithic VRE. OJAXþþ

Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT) tackles this issue via activity streams, as discussed in section 6.

5. Standardising VRE tool integration The Open Web is an ongoing effort to decentralise and liberate user data. It does not refer to any one technology or concept. Rather, it describes the combination of: . applications making their data publicly available to other applications; . increasing adoption of standards-based approaches; and . growing emphasis on data portability.

Earlier web applications were analogous to silos because of the difficulty of exchanging data between them. In contrast, an increasing percentage of recent applications make their data publicly available in machine-readable form, either via public data APIs or feeds. APIs are software interfaces that allow applications to interact with one another; OJAXþþ data APIs are those APIs that return data. Publicly accessible data APIs are becoming common among web 2.0 tools that deal with user data. Increasingly, such APIs are adopting open standards, thus improving the chances of interoperability between applications. However, there is still wide variation in the formats used by data APIs[4]. An alternative method of machine-readable access to application data is the provision of a feed. Feeds, traditionally in RSS or Atom format, have been used to 139 provide end-users with news and other updates (Wusteman, 2004). Because the data provided by such feeds is aimed directly at end-users rather than for manipulation by other applications, feeds tend to be less flexible and provide fewer options for data manipulation than do data APIs. Nevertheless, feeds are a natural fit for operations such as event aggregation, where the sophisticated features available via an API can be a disadvantage. Fewer options facilitate greater consistency between feed outputs; thus less effort is required to normalise feed data. A recent feed format, activity streams, specifically designed for “syndicating social activities around the web”[5] promises to make the flexibility of an open data API available via the simplicity of a feed. The activity stream format is based on the Atom feed format, thus facilitating the conversion of legacy feeds. The activity streams format has already been adopted by Facebook, MySpace and Windows Live, among others.

6. OJAX11 The OJAXþþ VRE[1] allows researchers to use popular web-based applications and then aggregates the data from those applications so that the researchers can organise their online activities and collaborate on their research in one place. Development of the OJAXþþ VRE involved the user-centred design technique of usability testing as one of a number of collaboration methods between potential users and developers. Usability testing, or user testing, is now a common component of software design; for example (Jung et al., 2008; George, 2008; Long et al., 2005; Norberg et al., 2005). It involves representative users performing a series of representative tasks (Notess, 2005) in the presence of a tester. The iterative application of usability testing in the OJAXþþ project ensured that user needs drove the design process at all stages.

Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT) The key features of OJAXþþ centre on its ability to act as: . a hub and central point for the aggregation of data from third party applications; and . a communication and collaborative system.

These two aspects are illustrated in Figure 1 and described below.

6.1 OJAXþþ Hub The organisation of research and associated content in an integrated fashion across third-party tools is an ongoing research issue in the ﬁeld of VREs. “Loosely-coupled VRE” is a term, coined by the OJAXþþ project, to describe the concept of a VRE that is interoperable with a number of tools but does not explicitly rely on any one of these tools. OJAXþþ acts as a single cohesive entity by providing a hub for third-party applications. This hub facilitates the management and overview functions normally EL 30,1

140

Figure 1. OJAXþþ: Hub and social networking features

associated with a monolithic, “everything in one place” online environment, such as an institutional portal. At the same time, use of OJAXþþ allows researchers to choose their own research tools. As illustrated in Figure 2, these tools may include generic social networking and collaboration applications, such as GoogleDocs, Twitter and Delicious. Additionally, they may include more research-speciﬁc applications, such as MyExperiment and Connotea. The OJAXþþ plug-in architecture allows easy addition and removal of supported third party applications. For an application to be supported by OJAXþþ, it must provide access to its data via a feed. Ideally this feed would be in activity streams format but it could be in Atom or RSS. OJAXþþ aggregates the accessed data and organises it into more useful classiﬁcations such as projects, as explained below.

6.2 OJAXþþ communication and collaboration system The communication and collaboration features in OJAXþþ add a social networking substrate to the hub of loosely-coupled third-party applications. Features include the ability to maintain a user proﬁle, details of afﬁliation, a social graph of research contacts and group membership, access and privacy controls, and private messaging.

Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT) Most signiﬁcant, in this context, is the feature to manage the user’s activity stream. This activity stream feature acts as an aggregator of the researcher’s personal online activities in a fashion similar to the FriendFeed aggregator[6]. Data retrieved from third party tools, via feeds, is normalised and stored in a generic source-agnostic form. OJAXþþ uses tagging as a common classiﬁcation scheme to denote the target project of an item of content. In OJAXþþ, a user creates a project and chooses tags which become “project tags”. When content from a third-party application is tagged using one of the project tags it will automatically be added to the “project stream” in OJAXþþ, as illustrated in Figure 3. Figure 4 shows the dashboard view that presents researchers with an “at a glance” display of all of their online research activity across multiple third-party applications, sorted chronologically into an activity stream. This stream can also be sorted via user, tags or types of research output. In the example view, the project stream contains: OJAXþþ

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Figure 2. OJAXþþ integrates the user’s tool choice Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT)

Figure 3. Use of project tags in OJAXþþ EL 30,1

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Figure 4. An OJAXþþ project with associated activity stream

. bookmarks from Delicious; . calendar events from Google Calendar;

Downloaded by Cornell University Library At 00:00 24 June 2016 (PT) . a video from Vimeo; . a citation from Connotea; . an activity from within OJAXþþ; . it could also include; . workﬂows from MyExperiment; . tweets from Twitter; . feeds from Facebook and ﬂickr; . and so on.

7. Conclusions The integration of tools and services within a VRE is an open and thorny research question. There is no one solution and all solutions involve compromises. The movement towards the Open Web ameliorates some of the issues but it will never be OJAXþþ possible to “integrate all technologies for every researcher into a single environment” (SURFnet, 2009). As the SURFnet report comments, in some cases, this will be the result of a lack of open standards or APIs; in other cases, it will be the result of too many different standards. SURFnet’s pragmatic solution to this conundrum is simply to live with some “use of external applications”. The OJAXþþ solution to this problem is to facilitate the loose coupling of research 143 tools within a single environment. The growth of a more open web, where users have control over their own content and data, is a central enabler for such a VRE. Using Open Web technologies, it is possible to create a central hub for managing research activity, regardless of the researcher’s chosen tools. OJAXþþ is an example of such a hub. In addition, OJAXþþ demonstrates emerging best practice for VRE design as identiﬁed by state-of-the-art reports: the adoption of lightweight, customisable, modular, Web 2.0 frameworks.

Notes 1. The OJAXþþ project: http://www.ucd.ie/ojax/ 2. The term VRE was coined by JISC around 2002-2003 but no consensus exists as to who ﬁrst used the term. 3. A comprehensive list of tools of potential relevance to researchers can be found at the Digital Research Tools Wiki (DiRT): http://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/ 4. ProgrammableWeb: http://www.programmableweb.com/ 5. Activity Streams format: http://activitystrea.ms/ 6. Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/

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