Open source e-research facility for socio-spatial data analysis

Under the ARCRNSISS Shared Research Resources program and an ARCLIEF project, researchers are developing a prototype open source e-research facility for social-spatial data analysis that incorporates GIS-enabled visualisation (mapping and classification) and statistical modelling capabilities. The e-research facility will give researchers online access to a socio-spatial data system including metadata directories containing Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and ‗value added‘ data variables for different levels of geography which may include statistical local areas (SLAs), functional economic regions (FERs) and polling booth catchments (PBCs). The e-research facility foundation is built with dependable and extensible open source technologies such as Geoserver, R, Java and PostgreSQL to deliver a flexible platform for the future. OpenGeo Stack (GeoServer, GeoWebCache, and OpenLayers) provides the GIS component with the Open Geospatial Consortium‘s standards for geospatial and location based services, R provides the statistical environment and Java API libraries-Rserve, iText and PostgreSQL provide a means of communication with R-backend, online PDF generation and database access. Interactive and standards compliant web 2.0 client experience is provided by javascript library-Jquery. Our example applications explore the relationships between socio-spatial variables for FERs – with statistical functions such as regression and MANOVA clustering. The web-based framework enhances the capacity of researchers and students to undertake socio-spatial data analysis anywhere and anytime. The open source client-server architecture decouples the computing complexity at the end user by avoiding installation and configuration.