DART News April 2006

Welcome to the second edition of the DART newsletter. Lots have happened since the first newsletter, way back in January. As always, better communication will help DART progress and hopefully make it more enjoyable for everyone. Now to the latest news…

What’s happening in the DART work packages?

Below are a few snippets of information from some of the DART WPs, to give you an idea of activities that are currently taking place.

DMQ: JCU’s team is steaming ahead with installation of CIMA at UQ, Sydney and Monash, and Ian tells me they expect to have ‘production-ready’ software available near the middle of this year, rather than in December as per the original proposal!

SI: Asad’s team is moving solidly ahead with the Storage and Interoperability area, although slow installation of the LIEF funded infrastructure (Grid and SAN) is threatening to slow them down a bit. Zubair just got a conference paper accepted!

CR: Tom’s team from Monash are building links into three research teams, as part of the CR1/CR4/CR5 work packages, obviously focussing on the three demonstrators. Stefanie Kethers recently joined this team, bringing expertise in ‘Trust, Mistrust and Confidence’. While this might not appear to fit into the DART project, CR4 for example is looking at overcoming barriers to researchers adopting DART style data and information management tools. There is a lot of mistrust to be overcome here!

AA: Jane’s team have had two conference papers accepted, with one recently delivered by Stephen Jeffrey in Greece.

DA: Andrew recently caught up with the National Library of Australia (NLA) to explore the program of work they will be doing for DART, as part of outsourcing of DA3.

Also news, is that Nathan Bailey from Monash will be helping with the overall DART portal architecture, developing a ‘DART’ look and feel for generic DART research portals, plus customised ‘skins’ to identify host institutions.

April DART workshops

26 people attended the Brisbane workshop, while 31 attended the two Melbourne workshops. Overall feedback was very positive and just about everyone thought that it had been very beneficial in terms of meeting DART people from other universities, hearing about the other work packages, making links with WPs sharing similar aims, but generally getting a better overall feel for the whole DART project. With 27 work packages spread over the 3 universities, managed by the 7 Chief Investigators, there are lots of opportunities for weak interaction, but the workshops helped overcome this quite a lot.

Three DART Demonstrators

The Canberra DEST presentation using the X-ray crystallography as an example to demonstrate the objectives of DART was, as previously mentioned, very successful, with feedback from both DEST and NCRIS extremely positive. Work is progressing slowly on the Climate Research demonstrator, while work on the Social Science and Humanities demonstrator is yet to begin. As the year progresses, these three demonstrators will become crucial to demonstrate the DART ‘proof-of-concept’ that is the aim for the end of the year.

DART Project Office

All staff are now onboard and the project office covering the three universities is fully operational. Judy Wrenn is working 3 days a week as the DART Admin Officer at Monash, while Frank Eilert is Project Manager at JCU 3 days a fortnight, with Marilen Silverio full time Project Manager at UQ.

DEST Reporting

March 31 was the first big reporting date for all MERRI projects, including DART. All the individual work package progress reports submitted by the DART teams on March 24 were summarized into the DEST progress report, which was sent off with a cash-flow report. I’m told by DEST that the second funding amount has now been sent to Monash this week.

People profile

This edition we ‘pick’ on Suzanne Little from UQ and Stefanie Kethers from Monash.

Suzanne is working for Jane on DA3 – Reduce wasted effort in creating metadata schemas and improve interoperability of metadata schemas. Let Suzanne explain…

I am also finalising my PhD titled A Semantic Framework for the Management, Analysis and Assimilation of Mixed-media Scientific Data’ under Jane’s supervision. Prior to DART, I was affiliated with DSTC (Distributed Systems Technology Centre) and a member of Multimedia Across Enterprise Networks and Domains (MAENAD). I was primarily involved with the Fuel cell Understanding through Semantic Inferencing, Ontologies and Nanotechnology (FUSION) project which examined applying, extending and combining Semantic Web technologies and image analysis techniques to develop a knowledge management system to optimise the design of hydrogen-based fuel cells. I was rather daunted to realise that this year marks my tenth on campus at UQ having also completed a four year Bachelor of Information Technology with Honours in 2000.

Stefanie is working with Tom Denison on CR4, one of Andrew’s WPs – Improve information management practice in research communities. In her words….

Before joining the Caulfield School of IT in April 2006 to work on the DART and Trust & Technology projects, I was a senior research scientist with CSIRO’s ICT Centre, Clayton, and a researcher in the Information Systems group at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. My research interests include computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), collaboration in organisations, plus modelling and analysis of trust relationships in social networks.

I hold the German equivalent of a PhD in Computer Science, Master’s degree in Computer Science, plus a Master’s degree in English Studies, all from RWTH Aachen University.

Issues/Problems

• Time to complete the DART objectives by the end of the year

• Time to handle all the other tasks/projects that Chief Investigators need to deal with.

• Lack of communication and poor interaction between DART teams needs to be continually addressed and overcome.

Reminder…

The next progress reports are required by Friday June 16. A long way away at this stage I know, but they will creep up on you

Jeff McDonell, DART Project Director April

28, 2006