NeAT Activities

Marine and Climate Data Discovery and Access Project (MACDDAP)

Marine and climate researchers need to better use their combined data resources, as well as instruments to observe physical and biological properties around Australia.  Basic services are being established through IMOS.  This project supports providers of marine and climate data sets, by creating efficient services built on international standards and software, to more easily manage, translate, and control these distributed digital repositories for the benefit of Australian researchers.

Data providers include:

• NCRIS Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS)
• CSIRO Marine Atmospheric Research
• CSIRO Land and Water
• Bureau of Meteorology
• Australian Oceanograhic Data Centre - Joint Facility

Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS)

The SISS project will develop some of the component services and functional capabilities needed to realise a spatial information data commons within Australia supporting linkages with academia, research, public and private sector data and service providers and users.  It will leverage OGC to enable tight integration of spatial data across Australia.  Core services identified include an OGC Catalog Service - providing a service interface to register meta-data.  At a minimum this will contain a register of registries that are available.  The registers also play a role in governance of standards associated with the spatial data commons (eg publication of interoperability profiles, controlled vocabularies, data standards).  A second service will be a discovery portal providing access to federated registry/catalog services.

Integration and Annotation Service for Biodiversity Data (DIAS-B)

The Atlas of Living Australia needs to have software for serving different types of biodiversity data - taxonomic data (eg taxon names and synonyms), specimen and observation data, species descriptions and associated images, diagnostic keys, genomic data, etc.  This project will develop services that are standards based for discovery of biodiversity data, and a service to enable annotation for the purposes of improved data quality.

Collaborative Integration and Annotation Services for Australian Literature Communities (AusLit)

The aim of this project is to provide services to address the eResearch needs of researchers involved in the study of Australian Literature.  In particular it will focus on cyber-infrastructure to satisfy needs of the ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) community. 

There will be three main outcomes:

• new data integration services
• collaborative annotation services
• compound object authoring, editing and publishing services

These services should enable Australian literature researchers to more easily search a wider set of Australian Literature resources.  Closed communities of experts will have the ability to collaboratively tag/annotate digital resources with keywords, notes, comments, interpretations, queries, links to related resources.  Annotations can then be shared with their community, enriching the collection, enhancing the discovery services and creating compound objects that link resources together coherently.

ASSDA Services for e-Social Science (ASeSS)

The Australian Social Science Data Archive (ASSDA) provides online access to over 1000 social science data sets, including census data, surveys and opinion polls.  Much of the high-value data that researchers want to access for secondary analysis has ethics and confidentiality requirements and these prevent the adoption of an open data commons approach.  A major challenge for ASSDA is the need to balance access and data analysis, including cross-archive search, textual analysis, spatial data analysis, computational analysis, modelling and visualization.  The data analysis tools will support the unlocking of otherwise inaccessible data sets of national significance.  Groups of researchers will be able to form ad-hoc groups to work together on a data set and problem and to focus on analysis rather than development of analysis tools.  The project will also develop data curation tools that will enable much lower cost acquisition of social science data.

A Data Fabric for Characterisation - Microscopy, Imaging, Neutron and X-ray Facilities (DataMINX)

This project will develop and deploy services that will enable researchers using NCRIS Characterization facilities to make use of the ARCS data fabric, including distributed data storage facilities and data management and transfer services.

This will include the:

• Australian Synchrotron
• OPAL neutron source at ANSTO
• distributed instruments of the Australian Microscopy and Microanalysis Facility (AMMRF)
• institutional X-ray crystallography facilities

The services will be based on the software and services that have been developed by the UK Science and Technology Facility Council (STFC) for it neutron and synchrotron facilities.  Training material and documentation will be developed to help researchers make use of the services.  The project will work to utilise the authentication and authorization services being developed by Platforms for Collaboration and investigate alternatives to SRB for future use.