A. MANAGING AND INTEGRATING LARGE DATA SETS
Time Sync: Mapping the Global Financial System
Lead Institution- University of New South Wales
$1,583,500
Time Sync will provide real time solutions for research organisations and provide flow on benefits to financial and business organisations that need to manage and synchronise massive data transfers within secure environments. The project will develop best practice e-Research principles for data security and sustainability of time critical data using data from the Reuters financial databases in the UK, and moving this over the education and research networks to Australia and to the APAC centre at the Australian National University.
Partners: Australian National University, Australian Stock Exchange, Macquarie University,
Reuters LLC and National Electricity Market Management Company
BlueNet: The Australian Marine Science Data Network
Lead Institution - University of Tasmania
$3,548,000
The BlueNet project will provide a highly distributed archiving facility to support the long term data curation requirements of Australia’s marine science researchers. It will link vast data repositories and marine resources that currently reside in individual academic institutions with government institutions in Australian and overseas. Presently three quarters of the Australia’s marine science data is contained in individual universities and not accessible to the wider researcher community. BlueNet will build infrastructure to enable the discovery, access and online integration of multi-disciplinary marine science data on a very large scale to support current and future marine science and climate change research, ecosystem management and government decision making.
http://www.utas.edu.au/cms/news_events/bluenet.html 
Partners: University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, University of Western Australia, Flinders University, University of Adelaide, James Cook University, Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing.
Molecular Medicine Informatics Model: A Multi-Institutional, Multi-disciplinary Research and Training Platform for Clinical Research (MMIM)
Lead Institution – University of Melbourne
$4,370,669
Through the MIMM project, medical researchers will be able to link and map records, tissue banks, images, clinical data and genetic data across common diseases such as epilepsy, diabetes, colorectal cancer, multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson’s Disease, prostate cancer and asthma in ways that were not previously possible. Using a sophisticated technology platform and advanced computing techniques, researchers will have unprecedented tools at their disposal to help identify factors, or combinations of factors, that predict treatment outcomes and identify drug responses.
MIMM presentation 
(1.2 MB)
http://mmim.ssg.org.au/
Partners: Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC), Multiple Hospitals and Medical Institutions affiliated with the Universities of Melbourne, Monash University and the University of Tasmania
B. TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT AND DEPLOYMENT PROJECTS
Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software (ASK-OSS)
Lead Institution – Macquarie University
$199,759
Open source software is now the primary basis for most e-Research analysis and computation. ASK-OSS will provide a national focal point for advice on open source software for research effectiveness as computation and analysis, particularly to support e-research, become more complex. This is an important systemic issue for Australia and will complement work being undertaken in the UK and elsewhere around the world.
ASK-OSS presentation (891.0 KB)
http://ask-oss.mq.edu.au/
Partners: Oxford University, Open Source Industry Association and Open Source Law
Middleware Action Plan and Strategy (MAPS)
Lead Institution – University of Queensland
$582,910
This project will identify the software and services (middleware) that are currently being used in Australia to link applications across a range of resources on networks and computer systems in Australian universities. The MAPS project will identify existing areas of activity in the university and research sectors, and use these results to tap into the expertise across the sector to build a strategic plan of activities and projects for an Australian collaborative middleware strategy. This is an important project whose outcomes will enable other projects to leverage off common infrastructure and focus on providing new services that can be shared across the education and research sectors.
http://middleware.edu.au/
Partners: Monash University, Australian National University, Macquarie University, Council of Australian Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT), Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), AARNet Pty Ltd and GrangeNet
Legal Protocols for Copyright Management: Facilitating Open Access to Research at the National and International Levels
Lead Institution – Queensland University of Technology
$1,330,000
This project will develop a set of legal protocols and generic licences that can be used across universities to facilitate and break down barriers to open access to copyright material. The Legal Protocols project will also develop best practice guides for managing copyright issues in open access environments – such as, where further commercial publication is expected – and a Rights Expression Language that can be used to technologically enhance open access to existing and proposed electronic stores of research and other data.
OAKLaw presentation (1.3 MB)
http://www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au/
Partners: National ICT Australia (NCITA), Australian National University, University of New England,
University of New South Wales, University of Wollongong, Charles Darwin University, University of Melbourne, ODRL Initiative, Earlham College and Stanford University, Creative Commons
C. TECHNICAL INTEROPERABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY PROJECTS
Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e-Research Technology
Project (DART)
Lead Institution – Monash University
$3,237,000
The DART project is a significant and strategically important project of interest to many institutions who are taking up the challenge of e-Research. This project will provide solutions to deal with the life cycle of research – from lab book to formal outputs to teaching. In doing so it will draw on differing needs and discipline perspectives of a range of research communities by pulling together expertise in marine science and sensor grids, expertise in distributed systems, database research and large data set management, and grid computing research.
http://www.dart.edu.au/
Download DART presentation
Visit DART wiki
Partners: James Cook University, CRC for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology,
University of Queensland
E – Security Framework for Research
Lead Institution – University of Queensland
$649,000
Secure access and the authentication and authorisation of researchers, who access services and infrastructure across global networks, are fundamental building blocks for e-research. This project seeks to establish an E-Security framework which will integrate different two types of security systems, PKI and Shibboleth, to foster collaboration and enable the secure sharing of resources and research infrastructure within Australia and with international partners. The project will leverage off existing work in both areas, build on the advantages or these different systems and create a platform to enable the secure sharing of resources for and research infrastructure.
E-Security presentation 
(1.3 MB)
Partners: Macquarie University, Council of Australian Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT), Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) and AARNet Pty Ltd
Regional Universities Building Research Infrastructure Collaboratively (RUBRIC)
Lead Institution – University of Southern Queensland
$3,872,700
RUBRIC will develop infrastructure and capability across regional and smaller universities to maximise access to digital research resources. This project wishes to take on the best practice developed from the existing FRODO projects and develop similar institutional repositories in thirteen other universities. RUBRIC will provide a means for these institutions to work in a structured framework using the latest tools, to act collectively and to develop the expertise that will be necessary to respond to emerging needs of the Research Quality and Accessibility Frameworks across universities.
RUBRIC presentation (818.5 KB)
http://rubric.edu.au/default.htm
Partners: University of New England, University of the Sunshine Coast, University of Newcastle (for the Intensive Research Universities of Australia), Massey University
The MERRI Projects will help Australian researchers to better manage wide variety of outputs of e-Research such as medical and financial data and store them in reliable repositories. Moreover, it will help to enable researchers to access these rich data sources across institutions, building greater opportunities for collaboration and maximising Australia’s research output.
With the cooperation and collaboration of the higher education sector, research information infrastructure can be developed and deployed to improve outcomes for researchers Australia wide. The great advances already achieved by the FRODO projects funded in 2003 and the ongoing interest being shown by the sector as a whole has generated a lot of interest in the research sector both here and abroad and it is anticipated that the MERRI projects will build on this success.
Meta Access Management System Project (MAMS)
Lead Institution - Macquarie University
This project is developing the software for creating better linkages between university information technology systems. The work is allowing researchers and students to access information more easily and seamlessly from different sources, both within Universities and between Universities. The work is attracting international attention due to successes in developing software for authentication, security and access.
MAMS presentation (1.7 MB)
http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au/projects/MAMS/
MAMS Overview (929.5 KB)
MAMS Overview 
(7.4 MB)
The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW)
Lead Institution -Monash University
ARROW will identify and test and develop software solutions to demonstrate best practice solutions for storing and organising digital information such as e-prints, digital theses and electronic publications in institutional repositories. This will include development of a repository and the enabling metadata to support independent scholars as well as those associated with institutions.
ARROW presentation (1.1 MB)
http://arrow.edu.au/
ARROW Overview (49.5 KB)
ARROW Overview (1.1 MB)
Australian Digital Theses Program Expansion (ADT)
Lead Institution - University of New South Wales
ADT will redevelop the existing central repository of the Australian Digital Theses Program (ADT) to increase its coverage and utility to the national and international research community. The repository’s content will expand to include metadata about Australian higher degree theses.
http://adt.caul.edu.au/newsprojects/adtariic/
Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR)
Lead Institution - Australian National University
APSR will focus on the accessing and sustaining digital collections. It will build on a base of demonstration projects for digital sustainability in collaboration with repository facilities within partner institutions.
http://www.apsr.edu.au
APSR Overview (774.8 KB)
APSR Overview (200.8 KB)