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NaaVRE - Notebook as a Virtual Research EnvironmentNaaVRE - Notebook as a Virtual Research Environment
Follow the tutorialOpen NaaVRE

Share digital assets with collaborators

In NaaVRE you can share source code, models, workflows and analysis results with your team and community.

Turn source code from Jupyter notebooks into workflow components

NaaVRE lets you create workflow components from Jupyter notebook cells and use these components to build workflows.

Run your workflows in the cloud

Execute workflows in a scalable cloud environment with configurable input and parameters.

NaaVRE (Notebook as a Virtual Research Environment) is a user-centric platform that supports the full research lifecycle through customizable Virtual Labs. It streamlines collaboration by providing unified access to data, models, and software, while removing the complexity of creating and executing research workflows on the cloud12.

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Documentation

We recommend that new users begin with the NaaVRE tutorial. For a comprehensive guide to advanced features, please refer to our detailed documentation.

Notebook as a Virtual Research Environment (NaaVRE) Platform

The LifeWatch NaaVRE platform is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows users to create collaborative Virtual Labs with customized runtime libraries, user interfaces, and workflow building blocks, and to conduct research activities in specific domains.

Collaborative Virtual Labs

All users and virtual labs within NaaVRE benefit from a shared ecosystem, enabling the exchange of data, workflows, and research assets among team members. NaaVRE is based on a familiar Jupyter environment with specially developed extensions for containerizing Notebook cells, composing and executing workflows, and searching and sharing research objects. By leveraging Jupyter Notebooks, a standard in data science, NaaVRE ensures a low barrier to entry while providing cloud-ready capabilities for advanced research.

Main Features

  • Sharing of Notebooks, workflow components and workflows with teams and communities
  • Containerization of Jupyter notebook cells into workflow components
  • Composition of workflows
  • Execution on a workflow engine

Supported Kernels

  • Python
  • Rscript

Publications

Footnotes

  1. Zhao, Z., Koulouzis, S., Bianchi, R., Farshidi, S., Shi, Z., Xin, R., Wang, Y., Li, N., Shi, Y., Timmermans, J., Kissling, W.D.: Notebook-as-a-VRE (NaaVRE): From private notebooks to a collaborative cloud virtual research environment. Softw Pract Exp. spe.3098 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3098. ↩

  2. Zhao, Z., Kissling, W.D., Hengeveld, G.M., Athanasiadis, I., Soetaert, K., Hof, A.: A Virtual Lab Maturity Model for Guiding the Co-Development of Advanced Virtual Research Environments. 2025 IEEE Int. Conf. Serv. Oriented Syst. Eng. (SOSE). pp. 20-26 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE67019.2025.00007. ↩