Platforms For Collaboration

The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy is a major initiative under the Government’s Backing Australia’s Ability - Building our Future through Science and Innovation. It aims to provide researchers with access to the infrastructure and networks necessary to undertake world-class research.

Within NCRIS, investment plans are being developed for several of the capabilities that were identified within the NCRIS Strategic Roadmap.

Once of those capabilities is Platforms for Collaboration which aims to develop an investment plan around services that support eResearch, and which can be expected to also involve a substantial invesmtent in underlying cyber-infrastructure.

Areas of Interest

The drivers for this investment are that all areas of modern research are heavily – and increasingly – dependent on technological platforms that are enormously enhancing the research community’s ability to generate, collect, share, analyse, store and retrieve information. These “platforms for collaboration” are continuing to develop rapidly, creating an ongoing flow of opportunities to enhance the quantity, quality and productivity of research effort.

The five key areas identified within the NCRIS roadmap and around which investment advice is sought are:

• Data access and discovery, storage and management
• Grid enabled technologies and infrastructures
• Technical expertise
• High performance computing
• High capacity communication networks

A range of additional issues are also being explored through a number of consultations. These are focussed around developing a vision for a national framework for research collaboration that would permit institutions to more easily recognise each other’s research staff and provide more simplified access to facilities and data (while supporting appropriate security, privacy and confidentiality requirements) and that would allow researchers to more easily locate and access resources relevant to their research goals.

Timeline and Scope

The purpose of the investment in Platforms for Collaboration is to support the whole research community, not just those areas relating to Roadmap capabilities. The investment plan will seek to build on work undertaken within the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative and will be specific about how NCRIS money should be spent to the end of 2007/2008. The plan may be less specific in out-years where it is considered desirable to leave flexibility for decisions to be made closer to the time of implementation.

The expected timing for this development is a progress report by November and a final report by March 07.

Reference Group

A reference group has been established to assist the process, see Reference Group for details of its composition and meetings; the group meets approximately monthly.

Consultations

A number of consultation processes have commenced, in !AAA, data management, eResearch Toolkits and further input will be obtained relating to HPC and networking.