Presentation accompanying talk on the ANDS Applications program at IDCC 2016. Discusses the outputs of the program, but also focusses on issues of sustainability of such eresearch tools

1. ANDS Applications Program:
Building Tools to Facilitate Data
Reuse
Stefanie Kethers Mingfang Wu Andrew Treloar
1ands.org.au CC-BY @atreloar

2. Outline
 ANDS overview
 Applications program
 Lessons learned
 Thoughts on sustainability
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3. ANDS at a glance
 In operation since 2009
 Approximately AUD90M total investment
 45 staff (mostly Melbourne, Canberra)
 Working to make Australia’s research data more
valuable
 Funding through to mid 2016 (probably 2017)
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4. So that researchers can easily publish, discover, access and use
research data through the Australian Research Data Commons
How Do We Make Data More Valuable?
Increasing Value

5. Key differentiators for ANDS
 No actual data storage
 Nationally co-ordinated approach
 Institutionally-focussed engagement
 “helping them meet their research data ambitions”
 Engaging with large nationally-funded discipline
investments
 Bulk of funds spent outside ANDS
 https://projects.ands.org.au/getAllProjects.php?start=all
 All disciplines covered
 Focus on adding value to data and re-use
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6. Applications Program
 “Applications that demonstrate the value of data
integration and analysis to answer complex
research questions”
 Enable and promote the fourth transformation
 Produce compelling demonstrations that could be
promoted
 Typically smallish projects (2 EFT, 1 year)
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7. Discipline distribution
 7 projects in bio/characterisation
 8 projects in climate change adaptation
 10 others (urban planning, marine research,
public health, humanity)
 For a completed list of the projects and their
profiles, please visit the ANDS project registry:
https://projects.ands.org.au/getAllProjects.php?start=
app
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8. https://projects.ands.org.au/getAllProjects.php?start=app

9. CASE STUDY
Soils to Satellites
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10. ands.org.au CC-BY @atreloar 10

11. Soils to Satellites
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12. ands.org.au CC-BY @atreloar 12

13. Lessons learned
 Support from research champions was critical
 Tight timelines were the enemy of modular
common design
 Outreach forms (blogs, videos) were more popular
than expected
 Data and system sustainability an ongoing issue
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14. Sustainability challenges
 More desire for bespoke solutions than can be met
 Every researcher’s needs are “special”
 Trade off between individual researcher's need and a research
community's need
 Finite amount of the right dev resource available
 and keeping them is difficult
 Waterfall development will deliver the right solution two
years too late
 Communities still constrained by old ways of working
 and culture eats technology for breakfast
 It takes a planet to maintain a codebase
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15. Sustainability responses
 ‘Good enough’ solutions are actually just fine most of
the time
 Adopt/Adapt/Augment is always better than Build
 Existing common toolkits let you focus on the missing
10% of functionality
 So don’t start from scratch
 But also don’t leech
 Involve research champions who can articulate their
community's requirements, and promote project
outcomes
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16. Questions?
 andrew.treloar@ands.org.au
 mingfang.wu@ands.org.au
 stefanie.kethers@ands.org.au
 andrew.treloar.net
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