eResearch manager’s report 2014-07-28

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Introduction

Since the last meeting of the UWS eResearch Committee on May 22nd we have updated the eResearch roadmap to reflect where we are in relation to the plan as it was set out at the beginning of 2014.

In June I attended the Open Repositories conference and a couple of other events to do with open access to publications and data, including organising an open-data publications text-mining hackfest in Edinburgh.

Looking to the future, the eResearch team has been involved in two internal funding bids in the last week:

  1. Research Portal 2 (P2): to develop a joined up research presence for the university, like the Research hub projects at Griffith and JCU.
  2. More end-to end data management via more support for the AAAA data management program we’re already running.

UWS Events – Research Bazaar

Now that UWS has all our staff positions filled, we’re making a big push to do more outreach to researchers via a number of channels, including visiting departmental meetings and research forums, along with attempting to run as many eResearch-relevant training events as we can get takers for. This is all done with the help of the eResearch Communications Working Group chaired by Susan Robbins from the UWS library.

To build eResearch capability we’re trying out Research Bazaar approach, which started in Melbourne with Steve Manos and David Flanders.

What exactly, might you ask, is the ‘Research Bazaar’ aka “ResBaz”? #ResBaz is, first and foremost, a campaign to empower researchers in the use of the University’s core IT services:

  • Empowering researchers to collaborate with one another through the use of research apps on our cloud services.

  • Empowering researchers to share the data with trusted partners via our data services.

  • Empowering researchers to establish their reputation through our parallel computing and supercomputing services.

  • Empowering researchers to invent new ways of experimenting through our emerging technology services.

Our eResearch partners Intersect are helping with this; they offer a number of Learning and Development courses, and we’re talking to them about developing and importing more.

Speaking of importing eResearch training expertise, we ran the first of a series of Research Bazaar events: Mapping for the Digital Humanities powered Melbourne eResearcharians Steve Bennet and Fiona Tweedie.

Right at the beginning of July Alveo, the virtual laboratory for Communications Science was launched by the NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane and UWS vice-Chancellor Barney Glover with a two-day event, starting with a hackfest day to generate ideas and interest, promote use of the lab and provide some hands on training. While we didn’t brand this as a Research Bazaar activity is certainly in the #resbaz spirit.

Projects

DC21/HIEv Wraps up

The HIEv project, née DC21 is now completed and HIEv has about 50 regular users at HIE. Thanks to Peter Bugeia at Intersect for project managing the final stages of the rollout and Gerry Devine, HIE data manager for promoting the software, and putting it to good use to build dashboards etc.

New features include:

  • Log in using your account at any.university.edu.au using the Australian Access Federation.
  • Share data securely with a research cohort until you’re ready to publish it to the world for re-use and citation.

New: Major Open Data Collection for the humanities

Our latest project, the Major Open Data Collections project funded by the Australian National Data Service is in the establishment phase:

  • Carmi Cronje is working with the ITS Project Management Office to establish the project and its various steering committees, boards etc.
  • The key staff member for the project, the data librarian has been appointed. Katrina Trewin, currently working in the UWS Library joins us on August 4th.

Adelta is nearly finished

The Adelta project is nearing completion, with users now testing the service:

  • User Interface work by Intersect is nearly done, pending some discussions with the Library about accessibility requirements.
  • Final bug fixes and tweaks are being applied, as per this milestone.
  • We are working with Sydney development company hol.ly to integrate the service with the Design And Art Online database, so that we have a true linked-data approach, with Adelta authors being identified using DAAO URIs. This builds upon one of the Developer Competition entries from Open Repositories 2014 – the Fill My List URI lookup service.

Wonderama

Andrew Leahy consulted for the Google Atmosphere event (Tue July 22) at the Australian Technology Park, Eveleigh. This was a Wonderama demonstration in collaboration with NGIS www.ngis.com.au, showcasing some of the NSW state government data hosted with Google’s geo platform.

Cr8it project rolls on

Cr8it is a collaboration between Newcastle, Intersect and UWS to build an application which live in a dropbox-like file Share Sync See service, so that people can move their research data from being sets of files, to well-described data collections in a repository.

  • User testing has started on parts of the software to do with selecting, and managing files.
  • Recent development work has been focussing on re-factoring the application to make it more testable, and easier to build on, once this is done we’re on the home straight to hook it up to the Research Data Repositories at UWS and Newcastle and start publishing data.

We are now seeing a lot of uptake of Cloudstor+, the AARNeT researcher-ready version of ownCloud, on which we are planning to put Cr8it from UWS users, for example Andrew Leahy reports that a few users a week are adopting it at his suggestion.

AAAA data management

Project to establish data management practices and infrastructure in the BENS group and the Structures Lab at IIE are continuing and we are developing new AAAA projects to start soon.

Meet DORA

New eResearch Analyst David Clarke has coined the term DORA: Digital Object Repository for Academe, a name for a generic service-oriented component for storing research data, which adheres to a set of eResearch principles David and the rest of the team are working on. We are currently evaluating software against the ideal DORA model. David’s happy to talk to you about this, as he has an Open-DORA policy ☺.

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eResearch manager’s report 2014-7-28 by Peter Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.