Towards an e-infrastructure for urban research across Australia

Abstract

Australian urban and built environment research covers a multitude of research disciplines investigating social, economic and physical phenomena at a multitude of spatial and temporal scales and across diverse aggregation levels, from individual-level through to cohorts and populations, and across a range of scenarios, e.g. public health, voting patterns. The development of a common software platform (e-Infrastructure) to meet the needs of such research communities involves tackling many challenges associated with data intensive areas of research. This includes dealing with data sets from a multitude of federal, state, municipal, academic and private institutions, which hold vast arrays of heterogeneous data. For many researchers these data sets are difficult to discover, access, interrogate and use more generally. It is also unrealistic to expect researchers to always have the technical capability and capacity to handle such large amounts of data, or to develop data processing tools making use of such data sets, or be able to run computationally intensive simulations and models based on these data sets. Islands of expertise and islands (silos) of data currently exist that have fragmented urban research and thwarted a holistic approach to the study of the Australian urban and built environment system. The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN - www.aurin.org.au) is a $20m SuperScience initiative established across Australia that seeks to address this directly by creating an e-Infrastructure aiming at bridging these gaps, by allowing researchers to conduct collaborative research in a security-enabled, browser-based environment providing seamless and transparent access to the distributed data and computational resources across Australia. These include metadata services, federated datasets, data integration and interrogation services, together with advanced visualization, collaboration and data storage capabilities. The goal is to provide access to rich datasets, state-of-the-art data processing tools, as well as a knowledge base where good research practices can be followed and used to assist researchers when navigating through vast data holdings to couple appropriate data and analytical tools for a range of urban research endeavors. In this paper, we address the fundamental question behind the establishment of this infrastructure, i.e. how to design a versatile and flexible software platform (e-Infrastructure) for urban research? The approach described is centered on establishment of a range of demonstrator projects addressing specific urban and built environment themes and the challenges they give rise to through a common e-Infrastructure. We believe that such an approach will allow delivery of early functionality in supporting a range of urban research scenarios, and at the same time support novel links between tools traditionally not applied beyond individual research fields. Through a common (core) e-Infrastructure, we expect to develop urban research capability that will offer a step change in how urban research is currently conducted, to support multi- and inter-disciplinary research scenarios whilst preserving full functionality in individual urban research strands. We describe the initial design stages of the AURIN e-Infrastructure from a technical perspective. The approach chosen is based on past experiences from a variety of eResearch initiatives, such as the UK e-Science National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS - www.neiss.org.au) project (Birkin et al., 2010); the Data Management through e-Social Science (DAMES - www.dames.org.au) project (McCafferty et al., 2009); the Spatial Information Software Stack (SISS) eResearch Facility (Liao et al., 2009), and the workflow-based image annotation using geographic information retrieval of TRIPOD (Purves et al., 2010). We illustrate the utility of the approach taken based on an initial set of demonstration projects exploring demographic and economic investigations of the Australian urban system.