Dr Ulrich Engelke2, Dr Vincent Fazio1, Dr Jens Klump2, Dr Lesley Wyborn3
1CSIRO, Clayton, Australia, 2CSIRO, Kensington, Australia, 3ANU, Canberra, Australia
We conducted a survey to determine if the existing AuScope Virtual Research Environment (AVRE) still met current researcher needs. A series of twelve interviews of key AuScope research groups were conducted in a semi-structured format. The interview asked participants how they use AVRE in their research and how the research infrastructure could support their work now and in future.
Through a thematic analysis, the researchers’ responses were categorised in a first step according to nine broad themes, including data acquisition, data processing/analytics, data storage, data access, data publishing and data products. In a second step, these were further divided into a total of 40 sub-themes. We present results from the interviews that gauge the level of interest and engagement with various topics and technologies, including Jupyter Notebooks, machine readable APIs, FAIR Data, metadata and federated portals.
Our analysis of the results indicates that many researchers would benefit from more flexible and extendable data access and analysis technologies such as machine readable APIs and Python Notebooks, rather than pre-packaged applications. Over the past decade considerable effort has been spent building web-based geospatial portals that provide access to prefabricated analysis-ready data products, built-in tools and fixed workflows. The desire for adding new features to these portals has been eclipsed by a strong demand for easier access to both less processed and analysis-ready datasets via human-centred and machine-friendly interfaces.
Biography:
Vincent is a senior software engineer who has acquired a broad range of software development skills over his 20+ year career. These skills range from creating websites that display 3D geological models to improving the FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable) compliance of metadata catalogues.