Dr Robert Shen1, Mr Kheeran Dharmawardena2, Mr Ben Chiu2, Mr Hamish Holewa2, Mr Jon Smillie2, Mr Muhammad Ali2, Mr Andrew White2, Professor Mark Easton1
1RMIT University, Australia, 2Australian Research Data Commons, Australia
Biography:
Dr Robert Shen – A research professional, Robert brings over 20 years of experience in higher education, digital innovation, and the research infrastructure sector. He received his PhD from the School of Information Technology, University of Sydney, in 2006. His career includes roles as a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, software lead at Australian National Data Service, and eResearch Director at Astronomy Australia. Since January 2022, Robert has been serving as the Director of RACE (RMIT AWS Cloud Supercomputing) at RMIT University.
Dr Muhammad Ali – leads the technical implementation of dataspaces projects at the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). He completed his PhD from UNSW, and in his previous roles, he worked across multidisciplinary projects while liaising with senior leadership, solutions architects, systems architects, research institutions and various stakeholders. His current role is to contextualise IDSA Data Spaces in Australia through pilot projects, use cases, reference architectures, and proof-of-concept implementations.
Abstract:
The Australian Dataspaces Program, led by the ARDC in partnership with the International Data Spaces Association, is establishing infrastructure and pilot projects to adapt IDSA’s secure, sovereign data-sharing standards for trusted data exchange between research, industry, and government in Australia.
To support ARDC’s efforts in creating a dataspace ecosystem, RMIT RACE (RMIT Advanced Cloud Ecosystem) is collaborating with ARDC to develop an Australian prototype of a dataspace testbed service, leveraging the IDSA testbed distribution. The Phase 1 of the project is expected to be completed in late 2025, with two objectives:
1. Deploy an Australian prototype of an IDSA dataspace testbed service across multiple clouds (AWS and NeCTAR), providing capabilities for testing and demonstrating a dataspace ecosystem.
2. Enhance the prototype by integrating Australian national research infrastructure like the Australian Access Federation (AAF), Research Data Australia (RDA), and Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA), enabling on-demand customised test dataspaces for specific research.
The anticipated key outcomes of the current project include:
1. Lowering the barriers for Australian research infrastructure providers who want to establish dataspaces within Australia to test their ideas and prototypes.
2. Establishing a demonstration capability that allows potential dataspace users and adopters to evaluate the benefits of a dataspace solution for their specific use-case.
3. Enabling Australian dataspace operators to assess available dataspace technologies for fitness-for-purpose against their priorities.
This presentation will detail the advantages of adopting a multi-cloud-based dataspace testbed services and share the lessons we learned in enabling national dataspace ecosystem by leveraging cutting-edge cloud services.