1. An Ontological Framework to Support Provenance in a Virtual Research Environment Edoardo Pignotti University of Aberdeen

2. ourSpaces VRE Help researchers to manage tasks involved in carrying out research Provenance is crucial in order to support transparency and accountability of the research process Semantic Web Technologies to support management of knowledge, resources, people and provenance

3. ourSpaces Ontological Framework

4. Lessons Learnt from Deployment Very comprehensive ontologies BUT unwillingness to provide metadata – Few required mandatory fields – Policies for project-/user-specific requirements Manage changes in user requirements – Extendable provenance/metadata framework – Hot deployment of new policies For more info see: Edwards et al. 2012 - ourSpaces - Design and Deployment of a Semantic Virtual Research Environment. ISWC 2012 (in use Track)

5. Questions? e.pignotti@abdn.ac.uk