The AURIN e-Infrastructure: design, development and delivery

Abstract

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.