Abstract

MELCOE at Macquarie University is well known for its work on the MAMS and Australian Access Federation (AAF) projects; but it also provides eResearch support in a number of other areas. (1) ASK-OSS is the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software - it provides a national advisory service on open source issues for the Australian higher education and research sector. (2) DRAMA is implementing a flexible authentication and authorisation framework for repositories (using Fedora as a case study), including linkages with the AAF to form a trust fabric for data sharing. (3) RAMS is a new generation of workflow system for team-based research collaboration, including a visual drag-and-drop authoring environment for workflow creation. This presentation will provide an overview of each of these MELCOE activities.

About the speakers

James Dalziel is Professor of Learning Technology and Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. James leads a number of projects including: LAMS (Learning Activity Management System), including roles as a Director of the LAMS Foundation and LAMS International Pty Ltd; MAMS (Meta Access Management System), a national identity and access infrastructure project for the Australian higher education sector; RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities), a project investigating open standards authorisation and e-Research workflows, and ASK-OSS (the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software), a national advisory service on open source issues for the Australia higher education and research sector. Prior to his current roles, James helped lead the COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services) project, was a Director of WebMCQ Pty Ltd, an e-learning and assessment company, and was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sydney.

Raymond Warouw is the Team Leader for ASK-OSS and Research Centre Manager for MELCOE, Macquarie University. Ray has 15 years of professional software development experience in open source and proprietary environments spanning research, education and commercial industries. Ray is named as a Partner Investigator on the current "Unlocking IP - Expanding public rights and the public domain in Australian copyright" ARC linkage grant application (which includes MELCOE as a partner), and is active and participating in the arrangement of information events for the Australian open source community. He is also experienced in e-research/e-learning infrastructure design, construction and deployment.

Chi Nguyen holds a BSc from University of Sydney and a PhD (Computing Science) from the University of Technology Sydney. He has over 10 years of IT experience both in academia, and in commercial R&D companies such as IBM, Lucent and Nortel. He joined MELCOE in 2004 and set up the first Australian Shibboleth Testbed Federation. He is currently the project manager for the RAMP project which focuses on building a framework for federated authentication and flexible authorization for repositories within the Australian Higher Education sector.