Building on the Atlas (of Living Australia)

Building on (the) Atlas:
Bringing data together to
answer new questions
Dr Andrew Treloar, Director of
Technology
1CC-BY @atreloar

Australian National Data Service
 An initiative of the Australian Government being
conducted as part of the National Collaborative
Research Infrastructure Strategy ($A24M) and the
Super Science Initiative ($A48M) through DIICCSRTE
 A collaboration between Monash University, the
Australian National University and CSIRO
 30 staff, funded to mid 2015
 More researchers re-using more data more often
 Data as a first-class object
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ANDS enables transformation of:
Data that are:
Unmanaged
Disconnected
Invisible
Single use
To Structured Collections that are:
Managed
Connected
Findable
Reusable
so that Australian researchers can easily
publish, discover, access and use/re-use research data.
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ANDS Applications Program
 Produce compelling demonstrations of the value
of having data available for re-use that will
 result in data being transformed or integrated across
multiple sources to produce new forms of information that
enable innovative, high-quality research outcomes
 deliver value to a high-profile research champion
 be relevant to a range of government portfolios
 engage with national research capabilities
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Two ALA-related case studies
 Soils to Satellites
 Edgar
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Soils to Satellites
Integration of disparate data
TREND & Ausplots ecological data (ÆKOS, CSIRO NSA)
• Plot-based plant community data
• Soil characterisation data - structure, pH ,nutrients, carbon etc
Atlas of Living Australia (spatially represented data)
• Species occurrence and distribution data
• Environmental characteristics
TERN AusCover (biophysical remote sensing data)
• multi-spectral characteristics of site.
TREND genomics data (BPA, SARDI, BGI, BOLD)
• Opaque “blobs” of genomics data including barcode
sequences, Soil Metagenomics data , isotope data

Edgar – tropicaldatahub.org/goto/edgar
 Shows locations where a bird species has been
observed
 Uses this information to calculate and display how
well the climate across Australia suits that species
 Shows an animation of how the suitable climate
for a species may change into the future
 Allows registered users to improve its accuracy by
classifying observations
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Edgar and ALA Biocache
 Edgar relies on ALA data and back-end services
developed by ALA under this project as Biocache
extensions
 Biocache designed to
 aggregate occurrence data from multiple sources
 provide data quality checks and cleaning of the data
 support assertions by the data made by software or people
 provide webservice access to this data to facilitate re-use in other
portals.
 More at ap30-ala.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/final-product-post.html
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Building on Atlas
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https://secure.flickr.com/photos/istol
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What made these projects possible?
 Open access to the data
 Licensing that allows re-use
 Co-location of data and tools
 Web services over the data
 Pre-computation where appropriate
 ALA as a unique national resource
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Thanks
 Soils to Satellites
 Peter Doherty (PM)
 Prof. Andy Lowe, Adelaide
 project team
 Edgar
 Marianne Brown (PM)
 A/Prof Jeremy Vanderwal,
JCUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szl61Eerfpo
 Prof Stephen Garnett,
CDUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8z2yFDYwHI
 project team
 ALA developers
11CC-BY @atreloar

Questions?
 @atreloar
 https://www.slideshare.net/atreloar/building-on-
the-atlas-of-living-australia/
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Building on the Atlas (of Living Australia)

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