National research data management initiatives

Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) Project

ARROW is a digital archive for Monash University's research output. ARROW contains open access published articles, working papers, conference proceedings, historic photographs and PhD theses. Its purpose is to store the research publications of Monash academic staff and postgraduate students and to promote global online access to that content.

Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e-Research Technologies (DART) Project

The DART project was completed between 2006 and 2007, and was been funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training. The funding was provided through the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) as part of the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability - An Innovation Action Plan for the Future. The specific objectives of the DART project were:

• To support and enable researchers, end-users, and appropriate computer systems to manage the creation and collection of data and to gain greater access to data and documents,
• Gather, manage and archive data and documents and access rights,
• Ensure that researchers could more easily perform their work and do so at a much higher level of insight and productivity than was previously possible, and
• To ensure that the Australian public has greater visibility of, and access to, publicly funded research.

Australian ResearCH Enabling EnviRonment (ARCHER) Project

The ARCHER project was completed in October 2008, and produced dedicated task forces for a number of NCRIS priority research areas. The objective of these task forces was to analyse e-Research data and information management needs and requirements, taking special note of existing IT services available and applicable to each research area. Adapting the generic DART middleware/software tools to suit each research area, these dedicated task forces further developed the tools to suit the needs of each discipline and, where possible, built and incorporated customised research portals. Part of the ARCHER project methodology was to productionise the software tools created during the DART project through operational testing, usability and reliability trials, and produce robust industrial-strength software tools.

The ARCHER project also produced a number of open-source tools including: XDMS, the ARCHER Collaborative Workspace, ARCHER Data Services, Hermes and DIMSIM/CIMA.

In addition, the ARCHER assisted with the creation of TARDIS, a project designed to facilitate the sharing and archiving of raw Crystallography diffractometer data.

Australian National Data Service (ANDS) Project

Monash is the lead agency to administer and drive the establishment of the PfC ANDS activity.  For further information please contact Dr Andrew Treloar (Director, ANDS Establishment Project).  Prof. Paul Bonnington (Director, Monash e-Research Centre), is the chair of the ANDS Establishment Steering Committee. More information on the intial ANDS proposal can be found here.