About the VRE4EIC project

VRE4EIC (A Europe-wide Interoperable Virtual Research Environment to Empower Multidisciplinary Research Communities and Accelerate Innovation and Collaboration) develops a reference architecture and prototypes to be used for future VREs including building blocks that can be used to improve existing VREs. The project addresses the key data and software challenges in supporting multidisciplinary data driven sciences.

Collaboration with Other Initiatives

	Two large ESFRI (European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructures) e-RIs (e-Research Infrastructures) namely ENVRIplus and EPOS are already collaborating as partners (represented by UvA and INGV respectively). At present we are working with a further 10 large e-RIs to ensure we have appropriate requirements and – later – validation and evaluation. We are collaborating with other projects in the e-Infrastructure clustering organised by the EC. This includes the 3 other VRE projects as well as more basic e-I (e-Infrastructure) projects. RDA (Research Data Alliance) accepted a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session on VREs at Plenary 7 in Tokyo which agreed to set up a RDA Interest Group covering VREs and the (approximately equivalent) Research Gateways (USA) and Virtual Laboratories (Australia). VRE4EIC was presented at the EPOS week in Prague (14 - 18 March 2016). VRE4EIC was presented at a session at EGU (European Geophysical Union Conference, 13,000 people) organised by EVER-EST, another EC-funded VRE project.  We agreed to cooperate and joint meetings are being planned.

Achievements so far

The project is now entering its seventh month of Activity. A number of preliminary deliverables have already been produced, along with the fundamental report on the State-of-the-art and user requirement analysis.

This deliverable provides the methods used for the requirements collection of the VRE architecture and prototypes, and presents the first findings from the user requirement analysis. It also includes the literature review of the state-of-the-art in VRE development.

As such, the fundamental report on the State-of-the-art and user requirement analysis is going to inform all the subsequent developments of the project, notably the use case report and the e-VRE Reference Architecture, whose initial versions are going to be released at the end of September this year.

During the last joint technical meeting of the Consortium, hosted by the Technical University of Delft on the 5th and 6th of April, plans have been made from the timely delivery of these two fundamental outcomes of the first year of the project.