Engage provides a picture of the UK's e-Research community

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A detailed picture of the UK’s e-Research community has been developed by the JISC-funded Engage Initiative. The Initiative interviewed over fifty researchers to build up a knowledge base of the many ways in which computationally intensive research is being conducted across research domains. Now that the e-Research picture has been created, the Initiative will review best practices and the lessons learned from the interviews, and the most promising technologies will be taken forward by a collection of Engage-funded projects. These projects were chosen because a significant contribution to the community could be achieved in a relatively short time-frame.

The Engage-funded projects cut across all areas of e-Research, from archaeology to climate modelling, and involve numerous applications of e-Infrastructure. A unifying aim of the projects is to deliver a new set of services and applications for the National Grid Service (NGS), the main provider of e-Infrastructure in the UK. They will also provide a user-base that is hungry for the improved services that these services and applications will provide. Three of the projects are described on pages four and five of this newsletter, details of the others can be found on the Engage website and in future newsletters.

The Engage projects will provide greater functionality and an extended user base for proof-of-concept software, by strengthening it and transferring it to the NGS. The first stage of the Engage Initiative identified the projects that could benefit from funding, the future stages of the Initiative will see the community benefitting from software that will be developed to meet their needs.

http://www.engage.ac.uk