 Welcome everyone, I'm Julia Martin from the Australian Research Data Commons. Thank you for joining us today for this webinar where Dr Adrian Burton will present an overview of the Cross-Anchorus National Data Assets Program. This webinar aims to provide information for interested parties plus an opportunity to ask questions. Just a bit of housekeeping, during the webinar you will be muted and also please note that the webinar is being recorded. As mentioned, there will be time for questions so please add your questions into the pod as they arise. I'll now hand over to Dr Burton. Hi everyone, welcome to this background briefing on the Cross-Anchorus National Data Assets Program. I'll probably go through a few slides of backgrounds, some of you will have heard this at the Anchorus meeting but not everyone was so I will just give that background for about 10-15 minutes and then we go to questions and discussions are pretty standard format. If you whilst you think of questions just put them, note them down into the questions pod. That way we've got an orderly way of working through them when we get to that part. Welcome to my living room as well, I'm sure you can see my collection of Indian folklore masks and stuff like that but this is part of our new working from home environment. So if we go on to the program itself, just to give you a really overview of what we're talking about here, this program, the Cross-Anchorus Program is part of a larger National Data Assets initiative that we'll talk about today. The idea of this program is to bring together data from clusters of increased facilities for particular impactful purposes. The spirit of this program is not so much for you to compete against each other to get the best idea and etc, it's really for us together to facilitate a really good outcome between the increased facilities so the spirit of this is not really a competitive call. We do have a process that does have an expression of interest, that's just to make sure that it's very transparent that anyone who did want to be involved in the facilitation phase had a chance to do that on an equal footing. So we'll start off in a very sort of normal expression of interest thing but the next phase will be very inclusive and a lot of facilitation in the spirit of we're all part of the One-Anchorus Program and this is meant to the actual objective of this whole program is to get Cross-Anchorus Data Facilities. So that's pretty much an overview of what the program's about, I'll just go into some of the details around some of those things for a little bit. So I said that this Cross-Anchorus Program is part of a much larger initiative called the National Data Assets, there are six programs and this is just one of them, we've divided it into programs because we have a lot of stakeholder groups and we wanted to be able to focus in some of the eligibility and criteria to make sure that we focused in on some of our key stakeholders or specific strategic imperatives that we had. The fact that we have an Enchorus Program just reflects the priority that ARDC puts on the relationship with the other Enchorus Facilities, we want to reserve a program that really focused in on the particular needs of the Enchorus Program and to make sure that no matter what happened in all the other parts of this National Data Assets initiative that we did have a focused allocation of resource for us to work with the Enchorus Facilities and it's allowed us to really focus, change the criteria to focus in on a specific opportunity that exists between the Facilities, but there will be other calls and you're certainly welcome to be part of the other parts of the National Data Assets Program, it's not exclusive, we've just reserved this particular one for the Enchorus Facilities. The National Data Assets again, the background initiative that the Cross-Enchorus Program is part of reflects the spirit of the Enchorus Roadmap and what we're saying here is that National Data Assets are part of the Enchorus Spirit in that they are nationally significant data assets that are built up to support leading edge research, so the spirit of this program is meant to reflect again the spirit of the Enchorus Review and then the Directions for Enchorus since the beginning actually. All right, so that means that this program is really focusing in on the fact that data itself can be a national research infrastructure and we spoke about this at the forum that this is part of the evolving spirit of Enchorus is that it's not just your sensor or your instrument or your concrete facility that is part of the infrastructure, but the data that's being produced by these facilities is itself becoming a national asset because well managed and with the right elements, it can support leading edge research into the future for a very, very long time. The elements that we're looking for when we're talking about a program to build data as national research infrastructure is that the data doesn't matter where it's coming from, it could come from research or government or business or anywhere, it's the data that's for research. It has to have a national scope because that's part of the Enchorus Spirit and as far as data is concerned that means it's not just data that's from a particular project or from a particular institution, but it's data that's contributed by people from organizations all over Australia that's consumed. Again, the users of the data come from multiple organizations and that it's being governed by multiple organizations, so that's a kind of rule of thumb to make sure that again in the spirit of the Enchorus program that the data assets that we're talking about have that national flavour. Of course, they need to be applied to research and we will put a lot of focus on that in this program and not only research, but the broader impacts of research as well. And of course, it can't be just a spreadsheet that sits on the desktop somewhere, it has to be the data set itself has to have the elements and the properties of infrastructure. I did remark at the Enchorus forum that, well, that's not news for anyone in Enchorus. You're all developing your own national data collections that are reflective of your facilities or even you're going further and pulling data from all sorts of other players. So this is something that you're already doing. It's increasingly business as usual that data is part of the national research infrastructure of all of your facilities. And we remarked at that stage that ARDC is here in very systematic and systemic ways to support you on that journey to being where your data is a major part of your own facility. Now, some of the facilities are at different stages in that journey and we have data services, compute and infrastructure, expert consultancy, support, skills, all sorts of things that we've been doing for a long time. And that continues regardless of this particular program that's just us helping you to build up your own facilities. Why? So now the rationale for us having a special partnership program with the Enchorus facilities is to move on to where are the assets that are across several Enchorus facilities. And that is a degree of difficulty, harder than just managing your own assets. It requires long-term coordination and collaboration between the facilities. And so therefore, that's the rationale behind having these projects. It's to pull together stuff that would be beyond the normal business plan of a facility. Got to be stuff that you're obviously interested in, but we're putting together ARDC resources so that doing this stuff, which would be risky, complex, requires several years of coordination that we can put the project framework in to support that. This was all reflected in the roadmap. And so here's a nice diagram from the 2016 roadmap report where they, in their wisdom, the chief scientist said that this kind of thing would happen, that national clusters of Enchorus facilities would be coming together, as you can see in the diagram here, coming together somehow and then applying all of the facilities to agricultural research and applications. And nicely, they've got, you know, APPF, ALA, Aeternal, Amarsane, and FF. So this is obviously part of the spirit of the Enchorus roadmap that we're operating under. Now, of course, as we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words. And in a diagram, an arrow or a line is worth a thousand diagrams. So this little part here that says, yeah, there's a line coming out from national infrastructure and it all comes together in this circle and it goes off to applications. There is thousands of hours of work for us to do to actually make that happen. And so that's this, you know, the spirit of these projects is to give us the time and effort to design how, in some cases, the infrastructure could come together across the applications. And of course, from the NNDC perspective, we're focusing in on the data assets that could be done across those facilities. So what do we mean by that? Well, it could be bringing together to phenomic, genomic, and environmental data to, you know, bringing complementary stuff to give different assets. Take these as just, what's the word, illustrative. We're looking to you to come to us with the ideas where it makes sense for you. But this is just to get out there what the kind of things that we've heard in our initial consultations around this idea. Also, where you might want to build up a large scale, let's say an image collection or something, so that you could run new frontiers of data science over a larger pool of a larger collection. Or where you might want to integrate stuff that you're all collecting, but in slightly different ways. And, you know, you would want to deliver it for to a particular stakeholder, external stakeholder for some very impactful purpose. They're the kind of things that we're thinking could be facilitated by these kind of projects, but open, of course, to other ways that of bringing together increase existing facilities to create these cross facility data assets. So that's the, the nub of it is that, you know, we will partner with the facilities. The idea is to establish these cross facility national scale data assets and that we would support leading edge research from that. So getting now down to the pragmatics of what that might look like ARDC is willing to invest up to $400,000 in each of these projects. They could go as we would be expecting a one-on-one co-investment. So the projects themselves could be up to 800,000. The projects could go up to two years. And the major criteria for this particular program is that we should be bringing together data from at least two increased facilities. It gives you an overview of that. Corp, we have this process here, which we're right in the middle of the first phase of that is expressions of interest that will close on the 4th of May. There's a form to fill out there. We're just looking at, you know, to get an idea of what the, what your your ideas are in these areas. If there are similar ideas, we may well bring people together. We want to work during the facilitation phase, which is a very generous phase, you know, from 18th of May to the 20th of July. So, you know, a two-month period there for us to be able to facilitate in the spirit of, you know, previous increased facilitations where we would work with you to make sure that there is a consensus between the cluster. And so that when we get to the request for proposal phase, we're hoping that that will not be a competitive thing, but that we will have already brought some very mature consensus ideas forward. Projects commencing Q3 2020. Look, all this happened before in the old world of face-to-face collaboration and meetings and no pandemics, etc. We, as in everyone, are looking to get on with business, but to adapt as well where some timelines, you know, where our partners have other priorities happening at the moment. And so we're open to adjust some of these timelines accordingly. Just to go back over the selection criteria that are in those documents, least two increased facilities needs to bring together data from at least two increased facilities. We'd be looking to, the co-investment can be obtained that there are actual beneficiaries that we're not just doing bringing together data because it can be brought together. There should be people and organizations and stakeholders that will benefit, that will do research and broader benefits will accrue. And we would look to have those beneficiaries involved as project partners. And, you know, the nub of it is that we're establishing a cross-facility data asset. As far as that data asset is concerned, these are the kind of things we have in mind. The idea is that through this project there would be, you know, a number of dimensions or a number of sensors bringing together data from increased facilities that could, some examples here, as we said before, it could be more integratable data across the facilities. It could be actually bringing together complementary types in a much more accessible way or in a designed and intent, with intention and purpose. Or we could be bringing together similar data from distributed facilities. We will be looking that, you know, for you to express to us how this fits into your commitment to supporting research and what insights and efficiencies might come from that, and that there is a view to impact beyond research as well. Because the very kind of deliverable of all of this is a new data asset, we will be looking to make sure that that data has the appropriate fair and quality standards to the application that you want to put it to. I think I covered this before. That's why we're doing this in a project format, is so that we can align activity from the independent work plans so that we can, you can work on areas of complexity and risk with a little bit of de-risking from the resourcing and participation of the ARDC. It allows us to invest in some long-term standardisation and coherence that is not always possible on informal or year-to-year plans. Just coming back to the last point around the impact and other things again from the roadmap, our infrastructure in the first instance needs to be used by research institutions and universities. So that's the first step, that the outcome of these projects is very clear that we're building this so that it can be used for research and we as a component of the projects we will be encouraging you to build the systems or the culture or the policies that allow you to track usage, research usage of the infrastructure so that that will be a fundable component of the partnership. It will also be a part of our reporting timeframe and we expect to extend the reporting timeframes will be on the end of any sort of build project time so that we can together report any longer term, any lag in and longer term uptake in the research community and then as this diagram says out to the right there of course that research has its own broader impacts and obviously as increased facilities we want to remain in touch and help you to monitor any of those longer term impacts and communicate them together back to the department and others. So it was just to underline that this research outcomes and the broader impacts that are considered to be and the planning for those inside the project is an integral part of the actual project itself. I think that's all I wanted to the end of these slides so you've got the actual website with all this information and there's a that's the best email address to follow up with questions on there's also a questions box now on the website. So that's all I had to do as a background kind of introduction. The other part of today is to allow you to ask any questions or discuss any of the objectives or criteria around the program. So Julia how did you want to manage the next part of this? We do have a couple of questions. One has can ARDC be one of the increased partners or either two increased plus ARDC? ARDC is not counted in that minimum of two. So it's ARDC plus two other increased facilities. The key thing there is that we're looking to have the data from two other facilities. So ARDC is not bringing our own data to the table here so it's the cross facility data collections that we're looking at. Thank you that leads nicely into the next question which is how much is this about the data itself? Can it be used to build a platform to bring these types of data together? This program is based on the data itself. It's focused on the data now of course you know between the data and the access platform the management platform the analytical platform you know these are in one sense you know artificial barriers. This program is focusing on the data content itself. So a project that only said to us you know we're developing you know the a platform to bring stuff together would not would that might be necessary to you know it's no use just having it out of there without you know having any kind of access framework or you know visualization etc. However that would not be sufficient you know the idea here is to is that the the deliverable is this new data asset and changes to the quality the standards the governance of the data are the major focus of these projects. All right thank you the next question is would data repository infrastructure development relevant to two increased facilities but not actually combining data be eligible but it sounds like you've just answered that question. I think I answered that in the negative is that right? Yeah okay so they are the only questions that we have in the question pod if one of the organizers would like to open up for a mute the participants if anybody has verbal questions we'd be happy to answer as well not at this time well there is an opportunity online on the ARDC website to include questions which we can answer we do have a Q and A section for the program as well so please by all means add any questions that you might think of at a later stage and we will endeavour to reply to you within one to two days business days just to go over what Adrian said the expressions of interest do close on the 4th of May would then we'll have that facilitation phase where we would like to work together with you on your ideas and the submissions in July so Adrian anything else you'd like to add before closing up? No don't hesitate to contact us if you've got dreams of ideas we're very happy to be sort of active part of the ideas formulation process because we again this is an in-inter-ancris program we're really focusing in on the facilitation collaboration and consultation rather than the competitive nature of this so don't consider us as sort of judges or anything like that we're really here to try and help you to help us all to build something that could work between the facilities. Hi Julia, Adrian it's Graham Galloway here, you hear me? Okay yeah so I was the one asked the question about platform I suppose I'm just wanting to investigate a bit further if we're putting up a project which will include a couple of exemplary projects where there will be real data but a platform that hopefully is a lot more reaches out to a much bigger audience so we would set up a platform with some examples or some not examples some real data, national projects but really want the project the platform then to be available for a whole lot of other projects is that sort of thing don't it fit within this the context of this program? Yes I think I think so Graham the availability of data is the key thing and again if you're setting it up in such a way that says that you know through this project these are the ones that will become available and we're setting up a you know a framework and a platform to enable that to scale up much more broadly in the future then I think that's actually a desirable feature because when you're bringing stuff together one end of it when a cottage industry thing says oh well somebody wants to know whether parrots that live in this kind of forest have fluffier feathers than other parrots now you could just say okay well let's get that one data set from these parrots and you know the environmental and the genome and phenome or whatever you could bring together that particular small data set and cottage industry kind of integrated well no yes you know just you know synthesize it if you like and so you've done you've brought something together but from our point of view that's not necessarily an infrastructure project you know just bringing together something for one applied sort of specific thing is at the end of cottage industry so that probably wouldn't be as desirable again at the other end of that spectrum where well we've just got something and we think that data could be made available through it and we think that somebody might be able to use it to integrate data between facilities would be you know not applied enough so I think you know good projects will actually have a combination of an ongoing platform for cross-increase data integration let's call that as well as you know real data that actually is integrated and and with particular purposes in mind that show that you know this is a real thing so I think it's a very good point Graham I would I think you know a healthy project would have to have a balance of that long-term generic infrastructure feel as well as you know real data being available and hopefully some real applications for research applications for it yeah does that sort of align with that super thank you the next question is must co-investment be cash or is in kind counted as well uh we have some general guidelines around that that we've already applied in that the previous platform call there I don't have the exact wording on on on at hand here but no it doesn't have to be cash you know it can be people who are applied to the project I think we have some guidelines around you know substantial components of an EFT that are applied to a project um no it does not have to be cash in that sense but it has to be real investment all right thank you Adrian um organisers are there any other hands raised for questions not at the moment Julia all right in that case um thank you very much everybody for attending and as previously said there are opportunities to be in touch and we would like to discuss your ideas thank you all for attending great thanks for that bye bye