{myExperiment} - A Web 2.0??{V}irtual Research Environment

e-Science has given rise to new forms of digital object in the Virtual Research Environment which can usefully be shared amongst collaborating scientists to assist in generating new scientific results. In particular, descriptions of Scientific Workflows capture pieces of scientific knowledge which may transcend their immediate application and can be shared and reused in other experiments. We are building the myExperiment Virtual Research Environment to support scientists in sharing and collaboration with workflows and other objects. Rather than adopting traditional methods prevalent in the e-Science developer community, our approach draws upon the social software techniques characterised as Web 2.0. In this paper we report on the preliminary design work of myExperiment.