Shen R1, Osborne D1, Holewa H2, Emamjome F2, Ali M2, White A2, Easton M1
1RMIT University, , Australia, 2Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), , Australia
Biography:
Robert is Professor and Director of Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) at RMIT University, where he leads the strategic implementation of the University's digital research infrastructure ecosystem. With over 20 years' experience spanning universities and NCRIS facilities, Robert has led institutional and national-scale initiatives that have advanced Australia's high-impact digital research landscape. He aligns infrastructure strategy with institutional and national priorities, secures competitive funding, and fosters collaborative partnerships across complex, multi-stakeholder programs, delivering innovative digital platforms that empower research and teaching excellence and long-term sustainability.
Abstract:
In 2025, RMIT and the ARDC successfully delivered Phase 1 of the Australian Dataspaces testbed project, deploying a multi-cloud prototype testbed service across AWS, Azure and Nectar, integrated with national research infrastructure including the Australian Access Federation (AAF) and Research Data Australia. Phase 1 demonstrated the feasibility of secure, sovereign data exchange in the Australian context and identified critical barriers to broader adoption: high upfront engineering investment, bespoke governance agreements, and the technical complexity of establishing interoperable dataspace ecosystems.
This presentation showcases the continued partnership between RMIT, ARDC and Federation University for Phase 2 of the Australian Dataspace Program, which transitions the testbed from a demonstration environment to an early operational Dataspace-as-a-Service (DSaaS) model. DSaaS provides a managed service in which the provider hosts dataspace infrastructure on behalf of participating organisations, encompassing connectors, onboarding workflows, identity and access management, and transaction observability. Rather than requiring each institution to build and maintain its own dataspace stack, DSaaS offers a plug-and-play capability that reduces onboarding friction and operational risk. Participants retain full data sovereignty while gaining access to standardised, interoperable data exchange underpinned by the IDSA Reference Architecture and the emerging Australian Rulebook.
Partner engagement sits at the heart of this work. We will detail our experience in identifying, engaging and supporting partner organisations to adopt dataspace infrastructure, from readiness assessment through to operational participation. The presentation will share lessons learned in enabling a national dataspace ecosystem in Australia and offer practical insights for infrastructure providers seeking to lower the barriers to secure cross-sector data collaboration in Australia.
