Yesterday I attended the AeRO 5th National Forum held at the Australian Research Resources Centre. It’s the first time this event was held in Perth, it’s also the first time I heard about this event. It’s a great opportunity for me to see the bigger picture and be more aware of what the eResearch community is trying to achieve, and the challenges they face.
I enjoyed the presentations about the various projects on building sustainable research communities, particularly HuNI and CATAMI. The common theme is to improve interoperability, standardise the way different entities in a field store, describe, annotate, and provide access to datasets to researchers in the field. Making it easier for researchers to search, discover, analyse this data and turn it into new knowledge.
I’m also fascinated by the Murchison Widefield Array project. Radio astronomy is totally beyond me, but hearing about the scale of the project, the data being transmitted wow’ed me. The current infrastructure around the world cannot cope with this bandwidth hungry field, therefore it’s difficult for researchers to collaborate with experts in other countries. I thought, is it actually cheaper to transport people than data?
It is apparent that research data management is important to researchers, and that’s where librarians fit into this big picture. It seems the participants recognise the importance of librarians in their projects as well, that’s great. I have good understanding of RDM, can’t wait to get more hands-on in this area.
Probably not related to eResearch, when I hear about all these projects, I kept thinking what would be possible if all library data are open, linked, and accessible via API. I wonder what the community would do with it? What will happen if all library management systems speak to each other?
Finally, can I just say, nerds are cool!
//icecjan/ 