Began today with one an explanation of a new Government driven initiative to drive the open access of research data and publications: AusGOAL: http://blinkev.co/eresearch2011/Session%20Details/?args[0]=1749 But the session raised a question that came up yesterday where I thought it was mentioned that the Australian Research Council was in its latest brief merely suggesting it w0uld be a “nice idea” if researchers published their findings OA. Must follow up this. The talk concluded with a call for a more activist Australian community — that is, those who want to take (Australian government?) information and reuse it for community purposes.
Next session was about AURIN – a project to build e-infrastructure for Australian urban research. This is divergent – it covers health, logistics, transport, forecasting, etc etc, so is not well integrated — a large disparate community.
AURIN is not about funding research itself but what was discussed were the challenges and progress and methods towards building infrastructure that does support research by leveraging tools that have been built as part of research grants. So a tool might have been developed that AURIN can take and make more robust and reusable. This is something good to know about and worth sharing with others back at CDU.
Next I attended a discussion on the state and progress of the TARDIS project – this is a repository for managing large scale scientific data along with linkages to the instruments used to collect the data and a data management system. By large scale we are talking about data from the Australian Synchrotron and how this is to be disseminated to university research centres and also indexed centrally.
Then listened to a session on ways of selecting a research data management platform. Lots of useful principles and advice here. Will have to share in more detail after I return at end of conference.
Finally this morning I visited a discussion on Provenance Aware Automate Quality Control. Again most useful. Provenance data is important for sharing and making sense and use of data, and sometimes the provenance data can be larger than the data file itself! This is still a proof of concept stage idea at this point.
More later after I attend the afternoon sessions.
