Ms Sophie Masters1, Mr Geoffrey Hall1
1The University Of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia
The VetCompass Australia (VCA) program collects real-time clinical records from veterinary practices and aggregates them for researchers to interrogate. Bringing together all seven Australian veterinary schools, it is the world’s first nationwide surveillance system collating clinical records on companion-animal diseases and treatments. This represents a significant resource but only offers access to part of the veterinary record.
Building on the VCA collaboration and infrastructure, we are developing the Veterinary and Animal Research Data Commons (VARDC) with co-investment from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). Our platform will deliver big-data opportunities to Australian veterinary and animal science researchers allowing them to mesh clinical data on focal animals with related data, such as pathology reports and imaging. It will offer a series of tools that will enhance the text searching, cleaning and analysis through the Virtual Lab, and will connect with other platforms, such as the Australian Imaging Service (AIS).
The VARDC platform is an Enterprise application leveraging Azure PaaS services. This includes Azure services and serverless features and is coupled with Microsoft’s customer identity access solution Azure AD B2C for authentication – providing a flexible, scalable & cost-effective solution.
When complete in 2023, this platform will offer a unique opportunity to examine animal health by bringing the many benefits of a big data approach to animal health, whilst maintaining a highly detailed view of the individual animal.
Biography:
Geoffrey Hall is the Technical Lead on the Veterinary and Animal Data Commons and comes with extensive experience leading and managing Software teams, platform integration, project management and Enterprise System Architecture for critical line of business applications across multiple industries.
Sophie Masters is the Project Manager on VetCompass Australia and the Veterinary and Animal Data Commons. She has many years’ experience in managing projects and programmes within scientific research institutions.