Provenance Policies Natural language

a b s t r a c t The ourSpacesVirtual Research Environmentmakes use of SemanticWeb technologies to create a platform to support multi-disciplinary research groups. This paper introduces the main semantic components of the system: a framework to capture the provenance of the research process, a collection of services to create and visualise metadata and a policy reasoning service. We also describe different approaches to authoring and accessing metadata within the VRE. Using evidence gathered from data provided by the users of the system we discuss the lessons learnt from deployment with three case study groups. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY licens