Dynamic User Interfaces construction for Virtual Research Environments

Nowadays, the rapid evolution of technologies is preparing a considerable and wide-reaching change in practices governing research activities organizations, knowledge acquisition, communication and exploitation. Virtual Research Environments (VRE) lay at the core of this digital innovation. They provide collaborative frameworks enabling scientists to produce and exchange results with peers around the globe in cost-effective manner. In their most advanced realizations, VREs are distributed and dynamically created environments where a set of resources are assigned to a set of users, (i) via interfaces, (ii) for a limited timeframe, (iii) at little or no resource providers cost. A VRE is indeed designed to be a highly dynamic environment, resources which partake in a VRE can be very-large in number and change in time. Consequently, user interfaces (UI) for VREs should face the same variability and dynamicity by actively adapting themselves to the functionality relative to the services needed by their users, or available at a specific time. We propose an approach for VRE UI dynamic creation that is, generic, automatic, and promotes an effective usage of the available resources. We show how such approach has been adopted and validated in a rich framework for supporting the on-demand VRE creation. We discuss solutions for VRE User Interfaces development, facilitating the sharing and reuse of UI resources, i.e. user interface constituents, trying to reduce the developer effort as much as possible and lower costs