Secure data sharing across portals: experiences from OneVRE

Abstract

Research and higher education are facing an on-going transformation of practice resulting in the need for effective collaboration and sharing of resources within and across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Portal technologies and portal-based virtual research and learning environments (VREs and VLEs) already have become standard infrastructures within a large number of research communities and institutions. From 2004, a series of research and development projects began to ask the question whether an open source videoconferencing and collaboration system could be used as a complete, or as a part of, VRE. This study presents the evolution of these projects and at the same time, describes the definition of a VRE and their future possible integration. The OneVRE portlet integration project attempted to create missing components, including adding secure and universal identity management. This moves the idea of shared data to a different level by creating a new administrative domain that is outside the control of a single local institution portal and resolves certain administrative virtual organizations problems. We explain some of the hurdles that still need to be overcome to make this venture truly successful, when a complete toolkit can be designed for the researcher of the future.

Linking Authenticating and Authorising Infrastructures in the UK NGI (SARoNGS)

“…This would allow for VOs to form and allow access to be granted in a more scalable authorisation infrastructure. 24 We have come across IdPs which release only that a login has occurred but release no further details about the individual in question. 25 Experiences gathered during an earlier EPSRC project, "Meeting the design challenges of nanoCMOS technology" [23], where participating institutions IdPs were expected to release project related roles: a delegation of authority which would require formal agreement and process.…”

“…OneVRE [24] is a Virtual Research Environment aimed at the Social Science community. It provides a social networking environment to establish communication within research communities.…”

e-Science–towards the cloud: infrastructures, applications and research

“…[3] write of their experiences in developing secure virtual research environments to integrate multidisciplinary research in 'Secure data sharing across portals: experiences from OneVRE'. Next, c 2012 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.…”

“…Turner et al [3] write of their experiences in developing secure virtual research environments to integrate multidisciplinary research in 'Secure data sharing across portals: experiences from OneVRE'. Next, Tablan et al [4] present 'GATECloud.net: a platform for large-scale, open-source text processing on the cloud', a paper discussing the authors' cloud-based platform's ability to perform large-scale data-intensive natural language processing experiments by harnessing the computing power of the Amazon Cloud.…”