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Abstract

The need for the data management infrastructure is being felt ever more acutely in the e-research community:

• The quantity of scientific data is increasing exponentially, challenging researchers to keep track of it all;
• This large quantity of electronic data creates new challenges for collaboration;
• There is a much greater expectation for online publishing of data and verifiability of experiments;
• There are concerns about security and privacy in many disciplines of e-research;
• There is a significant push to streamline the workflows of e-research by providing centralised, persistent, and reliable storage.

The ARCHER Project (Australian ResearCH Enabling enviRonment – archer.edu.au) was funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Education, Science and Technology in 2006, and is an attempt to begin to address these concerns, by providing a cogent, data-centred view of the e-research enterprise, which allows researchers the flexibility of iterative and heuristic workflows and ease of collaborative management, but ensures that data remains well curated and publication-ready, with appropriate metadata, provenance, and authorisation.

ARCHER has produced a suite of tools developed jointly by Monash University, James Cook University, and the University of Queensland. It provides infrastructure to assist researchers in collecting, managing, storing, collaborating on, and publishing scientific data. The Project builds on the earlier DART project (dart.edu.au), taking selected proof-of-concept tools and moving them to production.

ARCHER completes its tool suite in mid-2008, and is making its products available for community use.

In this presentation, we go through the aims and origins of the Project and demonstrate the capabilities of the ARCHER suite of 5 component tools, which can be loosely coupled to support e-research ventures. Underlying the connection between these components is an enhanced version of the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) repository software, developed by the project to enhance its metadata storage layer:

• DIMSIM supports direct deposit of research data from an instrument to a network data store. DIMSIM uses CIMA middleware, and deposits data securely to an SRB store.
• XDMS is a data management system for research data, which enforces the CCLRC Scientific Metadata Model and allows data access, export, and reporting through a browser interface.
• The data managed by XDMS is on SRB, and the metadata is edited on iCat, an ARCHER developed extension of the mCat metadata module native to SRB. XDMS supports dataset reporting, and export to repository as a METS package.
• MDE is a metadata editor which allows discipline-specific metadata schemas to be prepared, and metadata to be populated following those schemas. The discipline-specific metadata supported by MDE supplements the CCLRC metadata gathered by XDMS.
• HERMES allows batch data transfer to and from SRB by mounting it as a network drive; it also provides an offline mode and metadata editing capability.
• PLONE is a popular CMS, extensively customised to support e-research collaboration anchored to research data and projects.

About the speaker

David Groenewegen has been ARROW Project Manager since January 2006 and ARCHER Project Director since January 2008. Previously he spent a number of years working in the areas of electronic information provision and information literacy at Monash University, and in information resources at the University of Ballarat. He holds a Masters Degree in History from the University of Melbourne, and a Graduate Diploma in Information Management from RMIT University.