On Wednesday afternoon (along with staff and research students from Science, Engineering, and Architecture and Design) Elizabeth and I visited the Digital Media Design Lab to hear a selection of presenters showcasing their use of e-research technologies and demonstrating a number of cool projects they’d been involved with.

There were two visiting professors from other universities - Mark Gahegan (Auckland) and Neil Gemmell (Otago) - as well as six other academics from Victoria Uni. The general emphasis of the symposium was that e-research allows research to happen in new ways, using digital tools to enhance collaboration on a global scale. Research teams from around the world can benefit from each other’s work, share research data and even access (expensive) scientific equipment, across ultra-high speed digital network connections.

New Zealand’s “Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network” (KAREN) runs the length of the country, connecting most universities, and ties us into these international e-research networks.

For New Zealand, in the ‘corner’ of the world, the ability to borrow ‘number-crunching computing power’ or ‘telescope star-gazing time’ from other institutions with bigger budgets and more varied research environments is really exciting. Also, our own resources and data are just likely to be in great demand, due to their uniqueness and relative inaccessibility. By contributing our local research outputs to this global network we open up Kiwi ingenuity to the rest of the world.

Nationally, the “BestGRID” project has been run over the last 3 years to assess methods, applications, and infrastructure that could support a “fully-functional e-research ecosystem for New Zealand”. At Victoria, Sam Searle and John Hine from the school of Maths, Statistics and Computer Science are organizing equipment, facilities, friendships, and even programming know-how to help academics and post-graduate researchers make the most of this network of data and resources.

My favorite speaker was definitely Mark Gahegan, who spoke about his experience working in the US contributing to GEON, the Geosciences Network, and also about his more recent work developing visualization tools for geoscience resources. Gahegan is Director of e-Research and Professor in the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, at the University of Auckland (and an excellent speaker).

Gahegan described how, in the sciences and social sciences, a lot of time is often lost trying to interpret or re-interpret data previously acquired by other academics. How we understand come to understand the work we have created is tied up in the final research product itself, with few ways for us to convey quickly to the next person who comes along information such as:

• The process by which the research product was created,
• What other work the researcher was influenced by,
• Which scientific community ended up using the work,
• How that community used the work, etc.

Gahegan wants to capture and visualize geoscience research data in such a way that it is “semantically interoperable between people with different points of view, differences of opinions”.

More elaborate visualisation tools, like ConceptVista, an open source project that Gahegan has been developing, will enable researchers to view research data situated within the context of its creation and use. As a researcher works on her own project, she could be notified by the interface of previous outputs which match her method of data collection, or have been been used extensively by her target community in the past - and this could help her make better decisions about which resources in this vast global co-laboratory to make use of.

Slides from the speakers at the symposium should be available on the EResearch webpages shortly. Photos of the event should appear on the DMDN News blog soon as well.