Mr Alex Ip1, Dr Melanie Swalwell2, Dr Cynde Moya2, Mr Adam Bell1, Mr Steele Cooke1
1Aarnet Pty Ltd, Chatswood, Australia, 2Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia
Biography:
Alex Ip has worked across diverse sectors including manufacturing, software development, data engineering and eResearch infrastructure development over several decades. He has worked closely with researchers in domains including livestock genetics, Earth observation, geophysics, and, most recently, bio-informatics, digital asset preservation and text analytics.
Alex developed the operational prototype system which became Digital Earth Australia, and also developed the backend information architecture for Geoscience Australia’s current Geophysical Archive Data Delivery System v2 (GADDS2).
Within AARNet, Alex’s team provides innovative eResearch infrastructure solutions to projects including the Australian BioCommons, the Language Data Commons of Australian (LDaCA), and the Play-It-Again digital preservation project. The team also supports the Globus data transfer system in Australia.
Abstract:
Born-digital cultural artefacts are, by their very nature, ephemeral: posing the very real risk that we could lose significant parts of our cultural heritage unless we take active steps to preserve them now. Future archaeologists will not be finding digital content in digs.
The Australian Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (AusEaaSI) project is a consortium of Australian academic and cultural institutions, led by Swinburne University, which is taking the necessary steps to preserve our digital cultural heritage. AARNet provides shared emulation infrastructure which is used by member institutions to preserve invaluable and irreplaceable content. Targeted domains include digital media arts, architecture, graphic design, industrial design, games, social media, digital/digitised photography, augmented/virtual reality, and web/pre-web networking.
The development of the EaaSI system is championed by the Software Preservation Network (SPN), an international organization established to advance software preservation through collective action across five core areas: Law & Policy, Training & Education, Metadata & Standards, Technological Infrastructure, and Research-in-Practice. Yale University remains a leading institution in the development and deployment of EaaSI.
The first iteration of AusEaaSI has proven to be an unqualified success. This year, AARNet is rolling out its successor which further improves system capabilities and capacity. We will provide an overview of the Kubernetes-based architecture that improves portability and reliability, and opens up exciting new possibilities including hybrid cloud deployments.
Do you have important but at-risk media for an obsolete system? Find out how you can join AusEAASI to keep your digital content alive.