Lessons learnt from the deployment of a semantic virtual research environment

The ourSpaces Virtual Research Environment makes use of Semantic Web 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.