Research Technologies Service
The OUCS Research Technologies Service (RTS) aims to provide a centre of expertise supporting the development of research e-infrastructure. The RTS seeks to lead or collaborate on projects that pilot digital technologies on behalf of the University, in particular to contribute to suporting e-research; the development of virtual research environments; and provision of ICT services relevant to research across the academic divisions. It also occasionally holds events and workshops.
The RTS is a significant section within OUCS, comprising over 15 members of staff with expertise in project management, technical development and support, communications, and content management. During the 2005/2006 academic year the RTS led or collaborated on ten significant activities and a series of smaller-scale initiatives. The total grant income for 05/06 was in the region of £930K.
As a result of running a variety of projects and services the RTS has accumulated expertise in a broad range of areas:
- Requirements gathering relating to the research lifecycle (including within an e-Science context)
- Evaluation of online resources; metadata standards for resource discovery and open access
- Intute Arts and Humanities (formerly Humbul)
- Curation of digital resources, especially electronic texts; text encoding and associated metadata standards
- Access management via digital certificates (PKI) and Shibboleth; organisational issues (including virtual organisations) relating to identity management
- Portal frameworks (e.g. uPortal) and associated technical standards
- e-Science applications and grid computing
- Via collaboration with the Oxford e-Research Centre
- e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models (eIUS)
- Virtual Research Environment projects
- Federated searching and associated standards (e.g. Z39.50)
- Open source software, especially software licences and IPR, development methodologies and community building, institutional policies for software development, procurement and deployment
- SGML/XML document encoding together with tools, stylesheets and support for analysis, retrieval and presentation
Many of the areas listed above are embedded across the range of RTS activities. In particular this also applies to:
- Development of funding proposals
- Management of distributed projects and services
- Developing and deploying open standards for interoperability
A full list of OUCS support for research projects can be seen on our site.
Email enquiries to the RTS should be addressed to rts@oucs.ox.ac.uk
RTS-ANNOUNCE mailing list: RTS-Announce is an email list to publicise RTS activities and events. The list is moderated but is open for anyone to join. To subscribe, send a blank message to rts-announce-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. To contact the list administrator, please email rts-announce-owner@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Postal enquiries may be addressed to:
Research Technologies Service
Oxford
University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN
Tel: +44 (0)1865
283343
Fax: +44 (0)1865 273275
(map)
