Building an e-infrastructure to support urban and built environment research in Australia: a lens-centric view

The Australian Urban and Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) is a $20 million Education Infrastructure Funding (EIF) initiative that is building an e-infrastructure to support the urban research and built environment research community across Australia. AURIN is tasked with building an e-infrastructure that provides seamless access to relevant (distributed) data, with integrated analysis and presentation tools incorporating mapping and visualisation capabilities. The project is undertaking a bottom-up approach whereby the user community (urban and built environment researchers) are determining what datasets should be incorporated and the associated e-Research tools required to access and interrogate this data to support both discipline specific and interdisciplinary research endeavours. For the purposes of the AURIN project, the urban and built environment research community has been organised into Lenses – strategic implementation streams covering population demographics, health, transport and others. These Lenses are represented by panels of domain experts from across the country. Many of these Lenses cut across data, tools and comprise expertise stemming from the university, government and private sectors. The aim of this paper is to introduce this Lens-centric approach for determining requirements for datasets and e-Research tools. We introduce the AURIN open source portal and enabling technical architecture and describe how this is being built to support the Australian urban and built environment research community. We introduce some of the key datasets that are coming into the AURIN research environment, how these have been driven by Lens requirements and implemented through available web-based solutions. We also introduce the data and metadata management systems that have been developed and illustrate some of the data interrogation and visualisation tools currently available. We identify some of the strengths and challenges in building a user driven e-infrastructure and the lessons learnt so far in building this e-infrastructure.