=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=The Urban Research Gateway for Australia: Development of a Federated, Multi-disciplinary Research e-Infrastructure
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-993/paper11.pdf
|volume=Vol-993
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iwsg/SinnottBBGGGMMMNPTSSVW13
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==The Urban Research Gateway for Australia: Development of a Federated, Multi-disciplinary Research e-Infrastructure==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-993/paper11.pdf
The Urban Research Gateway for Australia:
Development of a Federated, Multi-disciplinary Research e-Infrastructure
Richard .O. Sinnott1, Christopher Bayliss1, Andrew Bromage1, Gerson Galang1, Guido Grazioli1, Philip Greenwood1,
Angus Macauley1, Damien Mannix1, Luca Morandini1, Marcos Nino-Ruiz1, Christopher Pettit2, Martin Tomko1,
Muhammad Sarwar1, Robert Stimson2, William Voorsluys1, Ivo Widjaja1
1
Department of Computing and Information Systems
2
Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning
University of Melbourne, 3010 Victoria, Australia
Contact Author: rsinnott@unimelb.edu.au
Abstract—The $20m Australian Urban Research Infrastructure (Victoria, etc), and indeed by commercial and research
Network (AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) began in July organisations. AURIN is tasked with breaking down the data
2010. AURIN is developing a secure, web-based virtual and organisational silos that have grown over time and are
environment (e-Infrastructure) - a lab-in-a-browser - offering largely a barrier to many eResearch endeavours. To improve
access to diverse, distributed and extremely heterogeneous data
the way urban research itself is conducted, it is essential to
sets together with an extensive portfolio of targeted analytical
and visualization tools. This is being provisioned for Australia- make accessible the silos of data that exist across Australia to
wide urban and built environment researchers – itself a highly overcome the internet-hopping modus operandi of research
heterogeneous collection of research communities with diverse where researchers access a multitude of web based resources
demands. This paper describes these demands and their on a one-by-one basis, or often spend weeks/months in
associated needs and expectations on the e-Infrastructure and obtaining permission to access particular resources hidden
illustrates through a range of working examples how the e- behind organisational firewalls. To achieve this it is necessary
Infrastructure allows inter-disciplinary research collaborations to develop and support services that allow data discovery and
to take place. An overview of the e-Infrastructure itself is federated data access, i.e. in situ access to data from the data
provided and how it allows tackling these demands.
providers. This federated model is essential for many reasons.
Keywords: Urban Research, e-Social Science, e-Health, e-Planning For many data sets, e.g. individual unit records or data from
commercial organisations, it is simply not tenable to build a
I. INTRODUCTION centralised data warehouse for all urban data. Furthermore as
data grows and evolves over time it is highly beneficial to
The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network
seamlessly leverage these updates and enhancements.
(AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) is a major national
Federated data access data models provide such opportunities
project across Australia that commenced formally in July
that a centralised data warehouse does not.
2010. AURIN received $20 million of funding from the
The implementation of the AURIN e-Infrastructure
Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry,
commenced mid-2011, with the first year year of the project
Science Research and Tertiary Education (DIISRTE –
focused largely on gathering community-wide research
www.innovation.gov.au) for the ‘establishment of facilities to
requirements on the core capabilities and data sets that should
enhance the understanding of urban resource use and
be provisioned (made accessible) through the e-Infrastructure
management’. In particular, the AURIN project has been
to the urban and built environment research community [1].
tasked with providing urban and built environment researchers
The University of Melbourne is the lead agent responsible
with a state of the art research infrastructure – an e-
for the successful delivery of the AURIN e-Infrastructure,
Infrastructure - offering seamless and secure access to data
however it is emphasised that the project is to be (is being!)
and tools for interrogating a wide array of distributed data sets
developed and delivered in a networked manner – working
from diverse agencies, to support a portfolio of research
with a multitude of agencies and groups across Australia
activities reflecting the diversity of the urban and built
providing either data or tools that should be integrated into the
environment research agenda.
AURIN e-Infrastructure. The Melbourne eResearch Group at
Australia, as indeed is the case with many other countries,
the University of Melbourne are primarily tasked with this
faces numerous challenges in the growth and planning of its
integration effort.
cities, yet there is surprisingly little integrated infrastructure
The cornerstone of the AURIN e-Infrastructure is on
that allow for the complex information that might inform
providing programmatic access to a wide and heterogeneous
policies and research agendas more generally to be accessed
array of data in a manner that supports urban and built
and processed for informed decision making based upon
environment researchers, as well as reflecting the agencies
qualitative data. Instead a variety of largely ad hoc and non-
(government, commercial and academic) and associated
interoperable infrastructures and data sets has been developed
stakeholders that are involved and especially their associated
over time by a range of national and State-based governments
systems and processes. Thus AURIN cannot mandate that
complex AURIN-specific software systems/software stacks using such facilities for enacting urban workflows is described
are installed and configured on government/commercial in [7-9].
enterprise resources. Rather the AURIN e-Infrastructure has to The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2
be cognisant of the existing solutions already deployed by the provides a summary of the core features of the technical
organisations involved. architecture. Section 3 provides a summary of the Australian
The field or urban and built environment research itself is data landscape. Section 4 illustrates through a series of
very broad and covers a huge array of disciplines: population examples, how the AURIN e-Infrastructure can be utilized to
demographics, labour markets, socio-economics, health, support urban research endeavours. Section 5 focuses on
transport, housing, amongst many other research dimensions. related work undertaken in the urban research space and draws
Specialisations of these are also commonplace. For example, a some conclusions on the work as a whole highlighting areas of
focus on indigenous populations, on the mental health of future work.
individuals living in cities, housing challenges facing first
home buyers etc. To accommodate the challenge of II. AURIN E-INFRASTRUCTURE
developing an e-Infrastructure accommodating such diversity The vision of the AURIN e-Infrastructure is to provide a
of research need, AURIN has identified a set of strategic unified environment for urban and built environment research.
implementation streams (lenses) of importance to subsets of Whilst it is quite possible to develop a collection of
the urban and built environment research community. Each of heterogeneous collection of data services and resources
these lenses has their own data sets, services and tools that targeted to subsets of the urban research landscape, AURIN
need to be provisioned. The set of AURIN lenses that were was tasked with a grander vision: a unified and integrated
originally identified in the AURIN business plan included: environment that could be used for a multitude of urban
1. Population and demographic futures and research endeavours through a single one-stop-shop: the
benchmarked social indicators; Australian urban research gateway as shown in Figure 1.
2. Economic activity and urban labour markets;
3. Urban health, well-being and quality of life;
4. Urban housing;
5. Urban transport;
6. Energy and water supply and consumption;
7. City logistics;
8. Urban vulnerability and risks;
9. Urban governance, policy and management;
10. Innovative urban design.
However driven by guidance by the AURIN management
board who provide oversight and independent guidance on the
AURIN project as a whole, the lenses associated with city
logistics, urban vulnerability and risks, and urban governance,
policy and management have been removed from the current
phase of the work. This was in part due to the complexities in
gaining access to the necessary data as well as the significant
amount of on-going sub-projects associated with AURIN Figure 1: AURIN Architectural Vision
across the existing lenses. It is anticipated that over 50
separate subprojects will be sponsored through AURIN, that As presented in [3], the AURIN e-Infrastructure is being
the Melbourne eResearch Group are tasked with integrating designed around a loosely coupled, flexible and importantly,
into a unified e-Infrastructure. an extensible service-oriented architecture-based paradigm.
The purpose of this paper is primarily to illustrate the This extensibility is essential since the project continues to be
application of the AURIN e-Infrastructure as a unified tasked with providing access to and integrating a variety of
scientific gateway for urban research across Australia new flavours of data beyond the traditional two-dimensional
highlighting the diversity of the data and tools that are relational and structured data, as well as new services and
currently available and their usage across a range of urban tools.
research endeavours. Detailed information on the original To achieve this, the AURIN architecture is comprised of a
proof of concept AURIN implementation was described in [2], range of components that communicate predominantly
with the extended data-driven AURIN solution described in through Representational State Transfer (REST) based service
[3,4]. The security solutions that are being rolled out across calls. These calls leverage the JavaScript Object Notation
AURIN are described in more detail in [5]. The detailed (JSON) for their message format encoding through its support
enumeration of the AURIN project portfolio that is to be for hybrid messages with adaptive content. This is particularly
integrated into the AURIN platform is discussed in [6]. The advantageous for the complex data descriptions and formats to
use of Cloud resources and performance measurements of be passed around within the AURIN e-Infrastructure. In
particular, given the natural geospatial application domain of
AURIN, the GeoJSON (www.geojson.org) data format has spectrum of geospatial information exists in many data
been used extensively for internal spatial data transfers resources and at a variety of scales: from latitude/longitudes,
between core architectural components. addresses, postcodes, Census districts, statistical local
The AURIN data e-Infrastructure extends the basic ideas authorities (SLA), local government areas (LGA), cities,
of data Grid pioneered in earlier e-Science/eResearch projects States, through to research defined geospatial areas such as
such as [10-12] and is completely data driven. The access to labour force regions (LFR) and functional economic regions
and usage of data from heterogeneous data providers is driven (FER). Other flavours of data also exist and must be managed
by metadata that is automatically harvested from a rich variety by AURIN including social media data such as Twitter, graph
of data service endpoints. Data can come in many flavours: based data, e.g. road networks, through to 3D data models of
structured data as might be found in a relational database cities.
through to unstructured data formats and 3D volumetric data. To tackle this the AURIN platform supports the filtering
At the heart of the AURIN data-driven e-Infrastructure is a and selection of data sets based upon a range of geospatial
data registration service. This is accessible through a REST- aggregation levels and their subsetting as shown in Figure 3
based interface, exposing methods to read, write, modify and where the selection of areas (and hence data of interest) is
delete records (depending on user/data provider credentials). done at the LGA level for Victoria. The selection of areas of
Registration of new datasets in the data registration database interest can be done through the user interface in several ways:
predominantly occurs through automatically harvesting and through the pull down menus and selection of areas/geospatial
moderating the metadata from remote metadata service data levels of interest, or through the map based interface
catalogues. A manual process is also offered. This includes highlighted in Figure 3.
support for bulk upload of data sets and importantly
descriptions of their associated metadata. At present it is
possible to harvest information from a portfolio of service
endpoints including geospatial endpoints, e.g. Open
Geospatial Consortium compliant Web Feature Services
through to web services and even JDBC endpoints. These
results are stored in an extensible (schema-free) structure.
Through utilization of the open-source indexing system Solr
(http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) the metadata allows for
searching over a range of terms and variables – driven by the
available metadata (see left of Figure 2) with the metadata
highlighted (see centre of Figure 2) for a data set from the
Victorian Department of Health and the kinds of
information/variables that are available (see right of Figure 2)
– in this case survey data on inadequate sleep is highlighted.
Figure 3: Selecting geospatial region and hence data of interest
Other core capabilities offered through the AURIN e-
Infrastructure include:
• persistent data storage (storing GeoJSON formatted
data objects);
• access to distributed data sets from a range of providers
through an extensible array of data clients;
• geospatial services that provide capabilities to deal with
the different geographic reference systems currently in
use;
• access through the Australian Access Federation (AAF
– www.aaf.edu.au) with work on-going to extend the
basic authentication model of the AAF to incorporate
more advanced authorization capabilities [5];
• an advanced user interface including support for
brushing and visualization;
Figure 2: Data Request Interface and Use of Metadata • a range of analytical and visualization tools, and
• workflows utilizing the Object Modelling System
Urban research data is implicitly geospatial in its nature. version 3 (www.javaforge.com/project/oms) and
Tools that allow filtering of the data based upon geospatial described in more detail in [7-9].
information / context are key to control the data deluge facing
urban researchers [13]. However it is the case that a rich
III. AUSTRALIAN URBAN DATA LANDSCAPE over 300 major data sets from a multitude of organisations is
made available through the AURIN e-Infrastructure and this
Urban research can be classified as data intensive research.
number continues to grow. Indeed based on extensive
Unlike other research disciplines where access to large-scale
feedback from the research community the primary need of
compute facilities is the primary hindrance to research
the AURIN e-Infrastructure is to allow access to data.
breakthroughs or to enhance research efforts, urban and built
To deliver this requires that programmatic access to data is
environment research is stifled through both access to and
achieved, or more specifically federated access to the
understanding of data. As noted, across Australia a huge array
distributed databases and systems. However at present many
of organizations exists that hold data that is fundamental to
data providers, especially national and state-based agencies,
supporting urban research. Whilst many of these data
do not currently offer programmatic access to their data
providers often have data that is directly accessible on the
resources. Rather, many data providers have web sites through
web, e.g. the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS –
which data can be found and accessed via a variety of
www.abs.gov.au) has data for direct download from its
html/web-based mechanisms, e.g. downloadable Excel
website – typically as Excel spreadsheets or zipped files, this
spreadsheets or .zip files from the ABS. Being able to access
model of data delivery places major challenges for researchers
distributed data sets from multiple organisations through a
when dealing with the volume and diversity of such data. As
single programmatic interface would greatly simplify the life
one example, the ABS has literally thousands of spreadsheets
of many urban researchers and allow major urban and built
and .zip files available for download covering a wide spectrum
environment research questions to be tackled.
of urban phenomenon. This situation is magnified when
To understand how the AURIN e-Infrastructure is
juxtaposed with other national and State-wide organisations
delivering an Australian urban research gateway, we highlight
holding data that can/should be used to influence urban
initial results from some of the early lenses. For each of these
research: Geoscience Australia (www.ga.gov.au); the Public
we highlight the kinds of data sets that are being made
Health Information Development Unit (PHIDU -
available and illustrate representative use cases demonstrating
www.publichealth.gov.au); the Bureau of Infrastructure,
the utility of the tools that have been provisioned thus far.
Transport and Regional Economics (www.bitre.gov.au); the
Australian Institute for Health and Welfare
(www.aihw.gov.au); the Australian Housing and Urban IV. AURIN RESEARCH CASE STUDIES
Research Institute (www.ahuri.edu.au); the Department
Climate Change & Energy Efficiency In all of these examples, it is important to emphasise that these
(www.climatechange.gov.au); the Department of are examples of what can be undertaken through the AURIN
Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and e-Infrastructure, i.e. the intention here is not to infer specific
Communities (www.environment.gov.au) amongst others. At scientific results based on data that has been used.
a State-based level other agencies hold a rich variety of data A. Population Demographics
that can/should inform urban research: these include transport There are many research challenges associated with the
agencies (VicRoads - www.vicroads.vic.gov.au), health continued growth and livability of Australian cities. The
agencies (VicHealth - www.vichealth.vic.gov.au) and the changing population profiles with an increasingly older
Health department of Western Australia (WAHealth - generation, the influx of immigrants and their integration into
www.health.wa.gov.au) amongst many others. society are some of the challenges facing Australia (and many
A further dimension to this data spectrum is that a other countries). These are not just research challenges but
multitude of commercial organizations also hold data sets that broader societal and governmental challenges that must be
need to be unlocked for urban researchers, e.g. the Public addressed. AURIN has identified a broad spectrum of data sets
Sector Mapping Agency (PSMA – www.psma.com.au) hold [18] and tools that must be incorporated to support research
the definitive geospatial information for Australia; commercial into this area as shown in Figure 4.
utility companies such as Ergon (www.ergon.com.au) hold As a representative example of the use of the AURIN e-
energy and water information whilst real estate companies Infrastructure, we consider the city of Sydney and in particular
such as the Australian Property Monitors (APM – the local government authorities of Sydney. Selecting the
www.apm.com.au) hold vast holdings of housing and rental situational context through the process illustrated in Figure 3,
data across Australia. and searching for data using the interface shown in Figure 2, a
Overcoming this diversity is at the heart of the AURIN e- reduced (filtered) subset of the AURIN data is accessible.
Infrastructure. Urban researchers should be able to access
diverse data sets as simply as possible. Key to this is the
notion of single sign-on where users authenticate through the
AAF using federated access control models, i.e. where they
authenticate at their home institution. Following successful
authentication, depending on their privileges they should be
able to access diverse data sets and analyse them according to
their research needs as if the data was available directly
through the web site (portal) they are accessing. At present
This live access to distributed data and mashing and
visualizing is typical of the kinds of functionality that
Australian demographic researchers have hitherto not had.
Instead they would typically access a wide range of different
web sites and download Excel spreadsheets, which would then
be imported into statistical tools such as STATA or R. They
would also not be able to undertake the advanced geospatial
analyses and visual capabilities as shown in Figure 5.
B. Economic Analyses and Urban Labour Markets
Australian cities as with many countries face challenges
brought about by increasing population growth and the
continued evolution of the global financial crises and the
impact on employment and labour in cities. This challenge is
further magnified with the increasing trend for longer life
spans. Furthermore given the increase in price of houses
Figure 4: AURIN Demographic Lens Data Landscape facing many major cities around Australia, there is a tendency
for city growth where workers have to commute increasing
1) Population Demographics for Sydney distances to/from work. As noted, to tackle such phenomenon,
In this scenario we focus on the population distribution of AURIN has identified a broad spectrum of data sets and tools
individuals living in Sydney according to the 2006 Census; the [18] that must be delivered to the wider research community
number of individuals in the labour force, i.e. individuals of a as shown in Figure 6.
working age, their income levels and their voting patterns.
These data sets are accessible from Landgate in Western
Australia (https://www2.landgate.wa.gov.au); Centre of Full
Employment and Equity (http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee) at
the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, and the
Australian Election Booth Catchment Areas from the ANDS
Spatially Integrated Social Science (SISS)
(http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/eresearch/projects/ands/siss) at the
University of Queensland.
The population distribution for Sydney is shown in the
choropleth map shown in Figure 5 (using a Jenks classifier set
to 3 – hence three colour codes). The labour force of Sydney is
overlaid on top of the choroplath map as centroids. Finally the
LGA voting profiles of Sydney are also illustrated. As shown,
the correlation between lower/higher income population in
those LGAs and the voting patterns given for the Australian
Labour Party from those LGAs. Figure 6: AURIN Socio-economic Lens Data Landscape
1) Employment and Urban Economics for Brisbane
Understanding local and regional employment trends and their
impacts on the local economy (and vice versa) is a major
factor affecting many cities. How do these local trends
compare to the national average is a key barometer to
measure. Shift-share is a widely used analytical technique
used to identify industries considered to have a comparative
advantage in particular areas [14]. The importance of
particular industries on the local economy can have a major
influence on society, e.g. should that industry suffer economic
difficulties.
Brisbane as with many Australian cities has areas with
pockets of socio-economic difficulties where local
investments and government support are often used to kick
Figure 5: Voting Profiles for Low/High Earners in Sydney start improvements in the local economy. Identifying these
deprived areas and measuring their levels of depravation is a
key component of urban economics.
Figure 7 illustrates how such information is accessed and
used through the AURIN urban science gateway. Data on
socio-economic variables including classification of household
income from the University of Queensland compared to the
total population are shown in the choropleth map. Also plotted
are those statistical local areas with lower weekly income. As
indicated by the density of the bar chart, the AURIN platform
allows extensive information to be returned and analysed.
Figure 8: AURIN Health Lens Data Landscape
1) Health Indicators and Life Expectancy for Melbourne
To understand how AURIN supports urban health research
challenges, we outline a typical research use case linking
individual level survey data, e.g. questionnaires, with other
data to derive particular health measures. In 2012, the
Victorian Department of Health completed a major survey on
the health and lifestyle of Victorian residents. This included
responses from over 25,000 individuals on a range of
Figure 7: Brisbane Low Income Households and Employment
questions concerning their health and wellbeing and factors
Patterns that can influence this, e.g. smoking, alcohol consumption.
Access to such individual responses is restricted and subject to
strict information governance constraints. These data sets give
C. Urban Health and Melbourne a representative, statistically relevant snapshot of the Victoria
A major challenge facing society is the increased urbanization population and cover measures such as “Subjective
and its impact on the health and wellbeing of citizens. Living Wellbeing” and “Work-Life Balance”. Complementing these
in increasingly populated urban environments has a range of surveys are data from the ABS and PHIDU. The ABS Census
factors that can influence the health of individuals. From the gives the most detailed information available for the
spread of diseases through the increased density and Australian population covering a variety of aspects of
centralisation of the population, the mental health of population demographics and living, working in Australia
individuals living in cities, to the increasingly sedentary more generally. PHIDU hold a rich collection of data covering
lifestyle of individuals, where physical activity is decreasingly births, deaths, health, e.g. cancer screening. At present PHIDU
undertaken. Health data can be specific health information on make available over 150 major data sets covering a variety of
given individuals with obvious security and privacy health related issues across Australia to AURIN.
considerations that must be addressed. Health data is also Figure 9 shows how indicators from VicHealth data can be
often aggregated by agencies for wider research purposes. used to improve understanding of population health survey
AURIN deals with both flavours of data from a range of data. Figure 9 shows the Victoria wide data for those who feel
agencies. To tackle such scenarios, the AURIN project has safe walking at night indicator compared with the indicator for
identified [18] a range of tools and data sets that need to be those who partake in civic engagement activities (VicHealth
brought into the urban research gateway as shown in Figure 8. 2011 survey). This data covers all of the local government
authorities of Victoria and is illustrated through choropleth
maps (feeling safe walking at night indicator) and centroids
(engagement in civic participation indicator).
Data Management through e-Social Science project (DAMES
– www.dames.org.uk) developed a variety of specialised
research environments through which a range of distributed
social science data sets and associated tools were made
available. These covered such as occupational data resources;
educational data resources; ethnicity/minority data resources,
and e-Health data resources [15]. However the magnitude of
the AURIN project and the live access to distributed data is a
major enhancement of what was attempted through DAMES.
The National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS –
www.neiss.org.uk) project also developed a portfolio of e-
Social science solutions that allow researchers to explore a
variety of what-if scenarios, using data sets such as the UK
Census [10], the British Household Panel Survey combined
with real time data such as Twitter. However, this was largely
focused on social simulation with a relatively small set of data
providers. Again the magnitude of the AURIN undertaking is
Figure 9: Visualisation of Feeling Safe Walking at Night much more ambitious.
Indicator and Engagement in Civic Engagement Activities A range of efforts are currently on-going to harmonise
Indicator for all LGAs of Victoria (VicHealth 2011). international data resources and archives of relevance to urban
and built environment researchers. Examples of these include
This data (these indicators) have been aggregated at the SLA the European Council for European Social Science Data
and LGA levels by VicHealth, however work is currently Archives (CESSDA – www.cessda.org) which aims to
ongoing to utilise the unit level (non-aggregated) data from harmonise social science data archives across Europe, and the
VicHealth. This is based on the geo-location of the individuals EU INSPIRE initiative (www.inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu) to
who have participated in the survey. This geo-location allows support global geospatial data initiatives. In the geo-spatial
for a range of analytics to be supported without revealing the area, the Open Indicators Consortium initiative
identity of the individuals themselves. For example, knowing (www.oicweave.org) aims to develop a visualization platform
how many individuals purchased alcohol in the last week may for any dataset by anyone. This solution currently allows to
be directly related to how close they live to alcohol selling deploy websites aimed at providing visual exploration
outlets. Similarly, knowing how little sleep they have might be capabilities for a specific, locally held dataset in a web based-
related to local noise pollution, e.g. living next to major urban environment.
transport junctions. The CyberGIS initaitive supported by the NSF
(http://cybergis.cigi.uiuc.edu) is perhaps closest to AURIN.
While not explicitly aimed at the urban and built environment
V. RELATED WORK research disciplines, the aim of exposing computing facilities
In many respects the AURIN work is tackling a common to process and analyse spatial data may offer collaboration
research phenomenon. All research disciplines are becoming opportunities with AURIN.
increasingly driven by the volume of data that can be created It is the case however that the pace of data generation and
and exist in various forms on the Internet [13]. It is the case data availability brought about by the rise in the use of the
that almost all research endeavours are limited by the ability to Internet and associated technologies, e.g. Web 2.0 and social
discover, access and optimally use web based data. media, has overtaken the way in which researchers themselves
To tackle this across Australia, major initiatives have been are able to discover and utilise the ever expanding volumes of
sponsored. Most notably amongst these are the Australian digital data. The AURIN e-Infrastructure has been developed
National Data Service (ANDS – www.ands.org.au) and the to be generic and to scale with the growth of data, however the
$50m Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI – data deluge and finding the right data remains a challenge. As
www.rdsi.uq.edu.au) projects. ANDS was largely focused on one example, there are at present over 300 data sets that are
research data catalogues and especially metadata related to the made available through the AURIN e-Infrastructure.
long term storage and archiving of data. RDSI is to be focused Searching for a common urban theme, e.g. “employment” will
on actual research data itself. Neither of these projects have return matches from over 20 organisations. When the e-
successfully managed to tackle the heterogeneity of research Infrastructure scales to up to 3000 data sets (each of which can
data integration that typifies what AURIN is doing. This is contain up to 200 variables) the magnitude of data
natural in many respects since they are generic and research management will be seriously challenged. However when
domain agonstic. compared with searching for “employment Australia” which
In the urban and built environment domain there have been a returns over 118 million matches, it is clear that the urban
variety of efforts that have looked at aspects of the challenges research focus of AURIN is a vast improvement of more
in supporting data-driven research. The UK ESRC funded generic search engines.
VI. CONCLUSIONS [3] R.O. Sinnott, C. Bayliss, G. Galang, P. Greenwood, G. Koetsier,
D. Mannix, L. Morandini, M. Nino-Ruiz, C. Pettit, M. Tomko,
In this paper we have demonstrated the application of the M. Sarwar, R. Stimson, W. Voorsluys, I. Widjaja, A Data-driven
AURIN urban research gateway in a range of scenarios and Urban Research Environment for Australia, IEEE e-Science
Conference, Chicago USA, October 2012.
illustrated how it directly supports data-driven urban research.
[4] M. Tomko, C. Bayliss, G. Galang, P. Greenwood, G. Koetsier,
This work is far from complete and an extensive portfolio of D. Mannix, L. Morandini, M. Nino-Ruiz, C. Pettit, M. Sarwar,
activities for lens-specific projects and their integration into R. Stimson, R.O. Sinnott, W. Voorsluys, I. Widjaja, The Design
the AURIN e-Infrastructure is very much ongoing. It is of a Flexible Web-based Analytical Platform for Urban
expected that the AURIN project will include up to 50 Research – Systems Paper, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2012,
Redondo Beach, USA, November 2012.
separate lens-specific research subprojects that will be [5] R.O. Sinnott, C. Bayliss, G.Galang, D.Mannix, M. Tomko,
incorporated through 2013 and beyond. Security Attribute Aggregation Models for e-Research
The work and scope of AURIN continues to extend. An Collaborations, Proceedings of TrustCom 2012, Liverpool, UK,
increasing focus of AURIN is on incorporation of social media June 2012.
data. Harvesting and use of Twitter data is already supported [6] C. Pettit, R. Stimson, M. Tomko1, R.O. Sinnott, Building an e-
infrastructure to support urban and built environment research
with tools that allow tracking of the location and movement of in Australia: a lens-centric view, Surveying & Spatial Sciences
tweeters and for example, the languages that they tweet in [2, Conference 2013, Canberra, Australia, April 2013.
16]. Such information provides a different, real time [7] B. Javadi, M. Tomko, R.O. Sinnott, Decentralized Orchestration
perspective of health information from providers like the ABS, of Data-centric Workflows Using the Object Modeling System,
VicHealth and PHIDU. 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud
and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2012), Ottawa, Canada, May
AURIN is also attempting to provide a degree of 2012.
intelligence in supporting researchers. This is being achieved [8] B. Javadi, M. Tomko, R.O. Sinnott, Decentralised Orchestration
in several ways: through repeatable workflows that document of Data-centric Workflows in Cloud Environments, Future
the scientific process; through classification and use of Generation Computing Systems, 2013,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2013.01.008
variables and their exploitation by tools, e.g. it is not possible
to take the average of a categorical variable such as 1/0 for [9] B. Javadi, R.O. Sinnott, J. Abawajy, Scheduling of Scientific
Workflows in Failure-prone Hybrid Cloud Systems, ASE Special
true/false [17]. Importantly, AURIN is allowing researchers to Issue Journal of IEEE CloudCom-12, February 2013.
collaborate. This working together and peer review is a key [10] M. Birkin, R. Allan, S. Beckhofer, I. Buchan, J. Finch, C. Goble,
aspect of AURIN. Given the diversity and breadth of the A. Hudson-Smith, P. Lambert, R. Procter, D. de Roure, R.O.
research domains, there is no single expert. Rather multiple Sinnott, The Elements of a Computational Infrastructure for
Social Simulation, Journal of the Philosophical Transactions of
experts must collectively work together to tackle the major the Royal Society A, July 2010, (DOI:10.1098/rsta.2010.0150).
challenges facing Australian cities and its future as a whole. [11] S. McCafferty, T. Doherty, R.O. Sinnott, J. Watt, Supporting
Finally we note that the AURIN e-Infrastructure is very Research into Depression, Self-Harm and Suicide across
much a supporting activity. That is, the work in the e- Scotland, Journal of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Infrastructure development is not targeted at delivering novel Society A, July 2010, (DOI:10.1098/rsta.2010.0150).
IT solutions per se nor exploring research challenges in e- [12] M.S. Sarwar, R.O. Sinnott, T. Doherty, J. Watt, Towards a
Virtual Research Environment for Language and Literature
Infrastructures, but on supporting the urban research Researchers, Journal of Future Generation Computer Systems,
community in their research needs. It is worth noting that the Elsevier, March 2012,
implementation work described in this paper commenced in http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2012.03.015.
earnest towards the end of 2011 and is now actively being [13] T. Hey, A.Trefethen, The Data Deluge: An e-Science
Perspective, Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure
used to convince the varied urban researchers associated with a Reality (eds F. Berman, G. Fox and T. Hey), (doi:
the different lenses, and the associated urban research data 10.1002/0470867167.ch36)
stakeholders of the vision of the e-Infrastructure as a whole. [14] Shift Share Analysis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift-
The project as a whole is planned to run to mid-2015. share_analysis
[15] L Tan, P. Lambert, K. J. Turner, J. Blum, A. Bowes, D. Bell, V.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Gayle, S. B. Jones, M. Maxwell, R.O. Sinnott, G. Warner,
Enabling Quantitative Data Analysis through e-Infrastructures,
The authors would like to thank the AURIN Technical Social Science Computer Review, January 2009.
Committee and Expert Groups that are directly shaping these [16] C. Pettit, I. Widjaja, P. Russo, R.O. Sinnott, R. Stimson, M.
efforts. The AURIN project is funded through the Australian Tomko, Visualisations for Exploring Urban Space and Time,
Education Investment Fund SuperScience initiative. We International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing,
Melbourne Australia, September 2012.
gratefully acknowledge their support.
[17] S.S. Stevens, On the Theory and Scales of Measurement,
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[18] R. Stimson, M. Tomko, R.O. Sinnott, The Australian Urban
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