Dr Jens Klump1, Dr Vincent Fazio2, Dr Pavel Golodoniuc1, Dr Ulrich Engelke4, Dr Lesley Wyborn3
1CSIRO Mineral Resources, Kensington, Australia, 2CSIRO Mineral Resources, Clayton, Australia, 3Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 4CSIRO Data61, Kensington, Australia
The AuScope Virtual Research Environment (AVRE) was launched in 2007 as AuScope Grid and has seen several changes over the years. AVRE plays a pivotal role in AuScope’s concept of federated infrastructure as a “Downward Looking Telescope” for studying Earth’s systems, bridging between data collection/data synthesis and analysis of data including assimilation/modelling/AI/ML.
We took the publication of the new 2021 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap (NRIR) as an opportunity to re-evaluate AVRE to see whether it still met the needs of the researchers it was built to serve, how we could improve its usability and how new approaches to sharing data and code could be integrated into the ecosystem of AVRE systems to make it more user friendly, versatile, and sustainable over the longer term.
We conducted a series of structured interviews and focus group workshops, and surveyed other virtual research environments in Australia and abroad to gather requirements for re-engineering AVRE. Our findings are summarised in a report. The resulting deliverables are grouped into three time horizons:
– Improvements of the portal in the lead-up to the next NRIR phase
– Update of the user experience
– Further changes after gathering user feedback
This presentation outlines the key findings in our report and the planned developments for AVRE within the context of the 2021 NRIR: in particular to address the critical challenge of Finding 4 on the need for integration of computing and data infrastructure and the maintenance of a strong digital infrastructure ecosystem.
Biography:
Jens Klump is a geochemist by training and leads the Exploration Through Cover Research Group in CSIRO Mineral Resources based in Perth, Western Australia. In his work on data infrastructures, Jens covers the entire chain of digital value creation from data acquisition to data analysis with a focus on data in minerals exploration. This includes automated data and metadata capture, sensor data integration, both in the field and in the laboratory, data processing workflows, and data provenance, but also data analysis by statistical methods, machine learning and numerical modelling.
Jens earned degrees in geology and in oceanography from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and received his PhD in marine geology from the University of Bremen, Germany.