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$3.2m to make research data more accessible

24 August 2005

Monash IT professionals will take a lead role in developing technology that will provide better access to research data and encourage research collaboration, after receiving $3.2 million from the Federal Government.

Their project, Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e-Research Technologies (DART), builds on an earlier project - Australian Research Repositories Online to the World - that collated published research and made it more accessible to researchers and the general public.

DART will take this a step further by storing datasets as well as the published research and making it possible to include annotations on datasets and publications. The DART project will be one of the first activities undertaken by the newly established e-Research@Monash Centre.

The bid team was led by Dr Andrew Treloar from the Information Technology Services division and the research is being done in collaboration with colleagues at James Cook University, the University of Queensland and the Cooperative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology.

Dr Treloar said people had a tendency to store data on their own or departmental computers which took up a lot of space, made it difficult to send the data on to others and placed the data at risk if the computer crashed.

"It also makes it difficult for researchers to find out whether anyone else has done any work in particular areas," he said. "DART will provide a central location that can be easily searched by researchers and other interested parties. It will also facilitate general discussion by enabling people to make comments on publications and datasets."

Dr Treloar said the project would use changes in technology to benefit the research community. "We're really trying to think about how we better support data-intensive research collaborations that require high quality network access.

"The way in which we publish research really hasn't changed much in the past 200 years -- we haven't fully responded to the implications of the new technologies for how research is stored and made available. We still largely provide static documents, which don't allow us to easily enter into dialogue around the research," he said.

As part of the DART project Dr Asad Khan, from the Faculty of Information Technology, will make available large datasets derived from sensors and experimental instruments.

The project has been funded by the Department of Education, Science and Training, under the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education. Initially, the DART project will focus on datasets from project member institutions but there are plans to support related activities for research undertaken across all Australian universities.