D4Science was the first model of an application level e-Infrastructure to define an explicit abstraction for the Virtual Research Environment (VRE).

The D4Science scientific application scenarios were served by innovative Virtual Research Environments. VREs were set up to provide the runtime framework required to support researchers in extracting further meaning from masses of heterogeneous data stored in institutional, national or community repositories. VREs offered significantly enhanced services to scientist without incurring high development and maintenance costs.

VREs, essentially Collaboratories, and services were necessary to realize the main target scenarios established by the project's scientific communities. This effort also included the adaptations of community-specific data and service resources to exploit the e-Infrastructure capabilities. Some of these VREs were consumed by scientific communities operating in the D4Science infrastructure domain, while others will be consumed by the services of other scientific e-Infrastructures.

The VREs provided by D4Science were essential for data selection and aggregation to produce required outputs. These outputs were used in the VREs combined with the computing processing power of the grid to undertake modelling, detailed mapping and report production.

It is because of its VRE management facilities that the D4Science infrastructure played a pivot role in the formation and operation of the target knowledge ecosystem. In particular, the D4Science e-Infrastructure became the aggregator of all the resources that populate the knowledge ecosystem and, through the implementation and operation of VREs, a broker for disseminating those resources within the ecosystem. To fulfil these expectations two main lines of enhancement activities were carried out for D4Science: (i) the enhancement of gCube, its enabling technology, and (ii) the consolidation and improvement of its management policies and procedures.