Introduction:
CoESRA: Collaborative environment for Ecosystem Science Research and Analysis
This project will demonstrate the use of an existing workflow environment and leverage eResearch infrastructure for synergistic use of ecosystem and biodiversity data for complex analysis that can be repeatable. The complex analysis may involve number of data transformation, harmonisation and refinement steps leading to integration, and use of different standards as well as customised algorithms to derive re-usable knowledge. The project will enable a research community to share their analysis tools and experiments that would be useful for others to re-run for analysis and repeatability purposes. The collaborative environment will be made available to the community as a “Desktop as a service” through NeCTAR cloud infrastructure. The project will demonstrate a cost effective way of providing an environment to use different data infrastructure for synergistic, repeatable, reproducible science as well as maximising the value of previous investments in e-infrastructure.
Overall Approach
a) Strategy and/or methodology and how the work will be structured;
Since the project is of short duration, the project will be focused on implementing specific use cases, which are
driven by the ecosystem science researchers.
Following are some of the strategies for the development of the project:
1. Prepare and conceptualise 2 use-cases in consultation with the ecosystem scientists
2. Conduct requirement analysis based on the use-cases, this includes understanding the requirements of the
use-cases, key datasets and analysis tools required and potential users.
3. Develop and expose datasets from a service interface with open-standard appropriate data model:
Datasets can be from a variety of national data infrastructure (TERN, ALA, IMOS) and individual data
collectors stored in a cloud infrastructure or individual repositories.
4. Identify the processing steps required to fulfill the workflow
Develop conceptual model of the processing step required
Identify the automation processes in the conceptual model
Identify the environment to run the automate processes
Bring together existing reusable tools required to fullfil the processes and develop some of the shims as
process interface
Configure workflow to be a reusable component to fulfill the requirements
5. Deploy the environment in Nectar cloud infrastructure via a “desktop on the cloud” model. This will be
performed under technical assistance from NeCTAR
This requires virtualization of desktop environment and should have an ability to scale to the requirements.
6. Develop an access mechanism for an environment for wider access to the ecosystem science research
community. The access mechanism will be based on AAF and OpenID Connect.
7. Workflow composition to satisfy use cases including developing minor connectors to satisfy use cases.
8. Communicate the outcome among the ecosystem science community by promoting in conferences and publishing
a technical document.
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