Dr Joanne Evans & Dr Yuan-Fang Li
Lecturer
School of Information Technology/Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics
Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University

Boardroom
Level 2, Alan Gilbert Building
161 Barry Street (Cnr. Grattan and Barry Streets)
Carlton South VIC 3053
AUSTRALIA

Abstract

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) was established by the Australian Government in 2008 to build the foundations of the Australian Research Data Commons to enable greater sharing and re-use of research data. ANDS aims to support the development of new research infrastructure to improve the capacity of researchers to collaborate around research data collections, both in and through time. It has been working with universities, other research institutions and government bodies on a co-ordinated program of projects to facilitate better creation, management, publishing, access and use of Australian research data.

One area which ANDS has targeted for funding is the mouse and plant phenomics communities, where the development of technological infrastructure to better support the creation, organisation, management and sharing of phenomics data, and to encourage organisational and cultural change has been identified as an international priority. This presentation will discuss the outcomes and connections between two of the phenomics projects funded by ANDS programs undertaken in 2009-10.

Part 1: PODD - An ontology-centric data management architecture for improved extensibility and domain independence

Dr. Yuan-Fang Li is currently a Lecturer at the Clayton School of IT, Monash University, Australia. He received both his Bachelor of Computing (with honors) and PhD’s degrees from National University of Singapore. His main research interests include the Semantic Web (ontology languages, semantic query & inference, knowledge representation, data management) and software engineering (formal methods & verification, software metrics, software product line).

Data management has become a critical challenge faced by many data-intensive scientific disciplines. Massive and rapidly expanding amounts of data and evolving data models contribute to making data management an increasingly challenging task that warrants a rethinking of its design. In this talk Dr Li will present PODD, an ontology-centric architecture for data management systems that is extensible and domain-independent. In PODD, data is logically organised in an object-oriented way. The definitions of objects are entirely specified by Semantic Web ontologies. The open and semantical nature of ontology languages makes it possible to modify the domain model without affecting existing data. Dr Li will also present the PODD system that we implemented to meet the challenge of managing phenomics data, as an validation of PODD's feasibility and practicability.

Part 2: Enhancing metadata capture facilities for histopathology services

Dr Joanne Evans is currently a Lecturer at the Caulfield School of IT, Monash University Australia. With qualifications and experience in information management, recordkeeping and archiving, and systems development, she is keen to explore ways in which library and archives principles are applied into scholarly practices in order to meet the challenges of the digital and networked age. She has a particular interest in metadata and archival systems development and was the project manager and information architect for the HOPS ANDS Project while working as a Research Fellow at the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, prior to her Monash appointment in December 2010.

In this part of the presentation Dr Evans will discuss the ANDS EIF Fast Start Project for the Histopathology and Organ Pathology Service (HOPS) at the University of Melbourne. This project aimed to address metadata scalability and sustainability issues through the development of ICT utilities to make the capture of metadata and its association with the research data generated by HOPS more efficient, in order for appropriately rich descriptions to be made available for harvesting into emerging institutional, discipline and national research data networks. This involved the specification and prototyping of a virtual integrated data and metadata repository and definition of a metadata model and associated services of a case management and research data repository for HOPS. Dr Evans will give an overview of prototype system, the underlying system architecture and information model, and the insight the project gave as to the readiness of the various layers of university and research community infrastructure to realise research data sharing aims.

There will be a light lunch beforehand in the Boardroom, Level 2, Alan Gilbert Building at 12:30 pm. PLEASE RSVP by Thursday 15 September if you would like to attend the lunch to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it