A Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for Bioscience Researchers

In this paper we present the Research Information Centre (RIC), a virtual research environment being jointly developed by the Technical Computing Group at Microsoft and The British Library. We view researchers as extreme information workers and the purpose of the RIC is to support researchers in managing the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research. Our first implementation of the RIC is focused on the biomedical researcher, leveraging commercial off-the-shelf software to the extent possible. However, the base architecture of RIC is designed so that it can be re-used for research in other domains.