4A Data Management. Acquiring, Acting-on, Archiving and Advertising research data at the University of Western Sydney

There has been significant Government investment in Australia in repository and eResearch infrastructure over the last several years, to provide all universities with an institutional repository for publications, and via the Australian National Data Service to encourage the creation of institution-wide Research Data Catalogues, and research Data Capture applications. Further rounds of funding have added physical data storage and cloud computing services. This presentation looks at an example of how these streams of money have been channeled together at the University of Western Sydney to create a joined-up vision for research data management across the institution and beyond, creating an environment where data may be used by research teams within and outside of the institution. Alongside of the technical services, we report on early work with researchers to create a culture of replicable use of data, towards the vision of truly reproducible research.

This presentation will show a proven end-to-end design for research data flows, starting from a research group, The Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, where a large sensor network gathers data for use by institute researchers, in-situ, with data flowing-through to an institutional data repository and catalogue, and thence to Research Data Australia - a national data search engine. We also discuss a parallel workflow with a more generic focus - available to any researcher. We also report on work we have done to improve metadata capture at source, and to create infrastructure that will support the entire research data lifecycle. We include demonstrations of two innovations which have emerged from the associated project work: the first is of a new tool for researchers to find, organize, package and publish datasets; the second is of a new packaging format which has both human-readable and machine-readable components.