Recorded ANDS presentations from Apps Day #2

If you were at Apps Community Day #2 in Melbourne you will have noticed the talks were being recorded, including the following presentations from the ANDS staff:

Topic	Presenter	Recording	Slides
ANDS and Apps background, ANDS expectations around Demonstrations of Value	Andrew Treloar	video	slides
ANDS Data Model and high-level RIF-CS overview	Andrew Treloar	video	slides
ANDS project lifecycle and process	Jeff Christiansen	video	slides
ANDS Core Deliverables	Stefanie Kethers	video	slides
ANDS Supporting services and Who can Help?	Andrew Treloar	video	slides
Apps RIF-CS and how to make manual sample RIF-CS records in RDA	Jeff Christiansen	video	slides

NOTE: The recordings of our partners discussing their projects (from both Apps Day #1 and #2) can be found by following the links on the 'list of projects' page

Tropical Data Hub Launch at JCU

Senator Chris Evans, the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research, recently launched the Tropical Data Hub (TDH), http://tropicaldatahub.org, at James Cook University in Townsville. The Tropical Data Hub aims to provide research-relevant data and information related to the Tropics worldwide. ANDS has provided funding for the TDH through the Apps program, with additional funding from the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, QCIF.

Ming and I were involved in some background help to JCU in preparation to the launch, including identifying outstanding records related to the Tropics in RDA, and providing comments on the TDH Web site. We now know a lot about Tropical records in RDA!

Thanks to Catherine Brady from ANDS, there is also now a Tropic Topic page in Research Data Australia, showcasing collections, parties and activities related to the Tropics.

Notably, Professor Steve Williams talked about the importance of the TDH data to his research and Professor Tom Burkot talked about the role the TDH has in the interface of his malaria research and policy based decisions.

Here are some links to the media coverage of the Tropical Data Hub Launch:

‘Silicon Valley’ of Oz: Townsville Bulletin, June 6th, 2012: http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/article/2012/06/06/336271_news.html

ABC news, June 06, 2012: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-06/website-hub-to-gather-tropical-research/4055292

DIISRTE media release, 5 June 2012: http://minister.innovation.gov.au/chrisevans/MediaReleases/Pages/TropicalDataHubtotackleglobalresearchissues.aspx

JCU media release, 5 June 2012: http://www-public.jcu.edu.au/news/JCU_103536

Apps illustrated

Yesterday I was looking some data visualisations and thought I'd try to use one to illustrate what the Apps program is about....

.... So here's a wordle cloud that I think quite nicely shows this. It's based on the descriptions of the intended functions of the software that will be developed across all of the Apps projects:

First Apps project described in RDA

Congratulations to the team working on AP32 (the Human Proteome Browser), who now have discoverable descriptions for the software tool that is being developed and the input datasets that their tool is intended to act upon (neXtProt, PeptideAtlas, the GPM and the Human Protein Atlas), incorporated into Research Data Australia (RDA):

These RDA descriptions will allow the tool and datasets to be discovered by others around the world by using Google and other common search engines.

For the technically minded, the underlying conceptual RIF-CS modelling for this system (showing the service, data collection and party objects and the relationships between them) is shown here:

NOTE however, that the above information model includes some components that are not yet fully functional (such as the software system itself which is still under development), and it also describes some intended output collections that as yet, can't actually be created as the software tool required to make them is not yet functional.

Therefore, only a subset of these descriptions of the system components have currently been published in RDA. These point to tangible existing objects (or in the case of the software tool, a RIF-CS service description explaining its current 'non-functional' status):

The full complement of descriptions will be described in RDA when the fully functional software system is deployed towards the end of the project.

Apps Community Day #2

Last Wednesday, Melbourne put on its best late autumn drizzle for the 2nd of our Community Days for our remaining Apps project partners.

We'd like to thank the attendees for coming along to what we felt was another very valuable day of community building.

This time we had 16 attendees representing 10 projects, and once again there were excellent background talks presented by each project team (the recordings of which will be linked from our project list when we've finished editing them), and there was plenty of lively discussion on a number of topics of interest to the group which included:

• How to leverage technology synergies between the projects, 
• How to engage non-technical users of the software tools being developed, and 
• How to collectively engage public sector data agencies (in each State) to make data available for research.