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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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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 within NaaVRE benefit from an integrated environment designed for the collaborative exchange of research assets. The platform enhances the standard Jupyter experience with custom extensions for workflow creation and execution. These tools allow scientists to transition from experimental code to stable, 'cloud-ready' workflows that are both shareable and scalable. By bridging the gap between familiar data science tools and advanced cloud infrastructure, NaaVRE minimizes the learning curve.

Main Features

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

Supported Kernels

  • Python
  • Rscript

Documentation

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

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. ↩