Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemThe Urban Research Gateway for Australia: Development of a Federated, Multi-disciplinary Research e-Infrastructure(CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2013)
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ItemVisualisation support for exploring urban space and place(International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2012)Urban research is fundamentally underpinned by heterogeneous, highly varied data. The availability and quantity of digital data sources is increasing rapidly. In order to facilitate decision-making and support processes related to urban policy and management, such data has to be readily analysed, synthesised and the results readily communicated to support evidence based decision-making. In this paper, we consider the current state of play of visualisation as it supports urban research. In doing so we firstly consider visualisation environments such as geographical information systems (GIS) and Cartography tools, digital globes, virtual simulation environments, building information models and gaming platforms. Secondly, we consider a number of visualisation techniques with a focusing on GIS and Cartography tools including space time cubes, heat maps, choropleth maps, flow maps and brushing. This review of visualisation environments and techniques is undertaken in the context of the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network project (www.aurin.org.au). AURIN is tasked with developing a portal and associated e-Infrastructure, which provides seamless access to federated data, modelling and visualisation tools to support the urban researcher community in Australia. We conclude by outlining future research and development opportunities in developing the AURIN visualisation toolkit by reflecting on the value of visualisation as a data exploration and communication tool for researchers and decision-makers to assist with the study and management of the urban fabric.
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ItemThe AURIN e-Infrastructure: design, development and delivery( 2012)The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN - www.aurin.org.au) is a $20m SuperScience initiative that seeks to support nationwide research across the urban and built environment. The project began in mid-2010 and is due to run to mid-2015. The urban and built environment community is extremely diverse and covers areas as disparate as population demographics, transport, logistics, housing, health, energy and water consumption, through to the future challenges facing the growth of urban settlements. To tackle the many challenges facing urban researchers, access to a wide array of distributed data sets and analytical and visualization tools is essential. These data sets come from a range of national and State-based agencies such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), from industrial and commercial data providers such as utility companies, from research institutions and the researchers themselves, as well as through social media, e.g. Twitter. The AURIN project has defined and prototyped a common architecture (e-Infrastructure) that is intended to make the access to and use of data resources and tools transparent to the research community. This paper describes the architecture that has been developed, its implementation and the supporting tools used in its development, testing and deployment. It provides an overview of the systems that have been developed thus far to realize the technical architecture and the experiences learnt in delivery of the e-Infrastructure.
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ItemAURIN What If?: decision support for projections of land use allocations( 2012)It is increasingly important to understand land use issues to fully assess the effects of environmental change and urban regeneration scenarios. Land use decisions may have a profound impact on biodiversity, reduced land productivity due to soil degradation, and contribute to land and water shortage (Searchinger et al., 2008). A scenario-based Land Use Allocation (LUA) is one strategy for understanding land use options (Bryan et al., 2011; Fiorese and Guariso, 2010). LUA can be broadly defined as the medium to long-term strategic planning process by which land managers consider diverse environmental, social and economic factors, before choosing how land should be allocated and used in a given region. In LUA, an assessment is typically made to identify the most appropriate multidimensional pattern to achieve a desirable goal incorporating spatial, biophysical, economical and political dimensions (Malczewski, 2004). Frequently, environmental models and research tools that attempt to support these projections of land use allocations are built upon frameworks and programming languages which are tailor-made for a particular purpose, and not easily extended to support a wider sharing of resources and collaborative work (Li, 2007). The AURIN project has enhanced one leading scenario optimization based tool: What If?™(Klosterman, 1999), and made this a core part of its e-Infrastructure. This paper describes the What If? tool and demonstrates its application in AURIN.
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ItemA data-driven urban research environment for Australia(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2012)The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) is tasked with developing an e-Infrastructure to support urban and built environment research across Australia. As identified in [1], this e-Infrastructure must provide seamless access to highly distributed and heterogeneous data sets from multiple organisations with accompanying analytical and visualization capabilities. The project is tasked with delivering a secure, web-based unifying environment offering a one-stop-shop for Australia-wide urban and built environment research. This paper describes the architectural design and implementation of the AURIN data-driven e-Infrastructure, where data is not just a passive entity that is accessed and used as a consequence of research demand, but is instead, directly shaping the computational access, processing and intelligent utilization possibilities. This is demonstrated in a situational context.
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ItemThe design of a flexible web-based analytical platform for urban research: systems paper(Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2012)In this paper, we present the functional capabilities scoping for a novel eResearch infrastructure providing urban researchers with access to datasets and analytical tools. The AURIN portal provides a “lab in a browser” environment, leveraging a complex, loosely-coupled internal architecture and a growing number of federated data sources. Datasets can be “shopped” for, visually explored and analyzed using a growing number of analytical capabilities orchestrated in a workflow environment. While spatial analytical tasks are at the heart of most targeted research disciplines, AURIN aims to reach beyond the scope of traditional GIS and map-based portals. In this paper, we discuss how the functional requirements of AURIN can be realized to enable exploratory and confirmatory data analysis supported by high performance Web based infrastructure.
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ItemTowards an e-Infrastructure for urban research across Australia(IEEE, 2011-12-01)