DART: building the new collaborative e-research infrastructure

In early 2005, the Australian Government called for proposals for collaborative projects that brought together consortia to improve accessibility to Australian research. The call for proposals identified four areas of interest: (1) maximising access to digital resources in Australian universities, especially regional universities; (2) creating new types of digital libraries to manage extremely large data sets; (3) adopting a national approach to improving open access to the results of publicly funded research; (4) providing effective linkages between sets of research information to enable seamless access by researchers. The call for proposals also identified a number of key trends that are changing the way in which research is conducted and its outputs consumed. These included new technologies, such as computer simulations, synchrotrons and sensor networks, the expanding size of the datasets on which research is based, increasing volumes of information generated through research, and a recognition of the need to work across traditional disciplinary, institutional and national borders. The Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility, and Annotation e-Research Technologies (DART 2006) Project was successful in receiving funding under this program. DART is responding to these trends and changes by developing and assessing new e-research collaboration tools and infrastructure. The project will be nearing completion by the time of the Educause AustralAsia 2007 conference, and so a late-stage progress report will be delivered as part of the presentation. This paper begins by describing the context in which the DART bid was submitted, both environmental (described above) and theoretical. The paper then goes on to describe the overall architecture for DART and its various work packages. Each group of work packages is placed in the context of the domain requirements and the theoretical model. Finally, the paper concludes by examining progress to date on the project, as well as describing links to related activity. Contributors: Educause Australasia [2007 : Melbourne, Australia] ; Coverage: Rights: