 I'd like to welcome everybody here to our data capture briefing today. We are very pleased to have representatives of so many places here today. And indeed, it's a good idea perhaps before we proceed any further to do some introductions. We have a lot of Ann's staff here, people who are speaking, such as myself, I'm Margaret Henty. I come from the Canberra office of Ann's. But we also, people who are speaking and also those who are associated with data capture briefing, project proposals and so on, the Ann's contact people here at Monash. So if I can just get people to stand up Sally, Sally good enough from the Canberra office. Myself, as I've said, Margaret Henty, Monica from the Canberra office who's up the back. Nick Nicholas will be talking to us, Nick. He's hiding outside. He's shy. Shabin up in the back row. Andrew Trelaw in the front. Steve Bennett, who I whom I can't see. Jeff Christensen in the third row there. Stephanie Kethers, who has been asking you to sign our video release forms. Angela Lange over on the side there. And Susan Leeper, who is again an Ann's contact person. And if you want to know why people are listed there in that particular order, I think it is totally random. We have here representatives of La Trobe University. Can you identify yourselves? Oh, in the front row. Monash University, Anthony Wright, oh, quite a number of people. RMIT, Wright. The Synctitron up the back. The University of Melbourne. Oh, nice group of people. And people from Versi. And the Versi people I understand are here because they are actually associated with data capture projects. Is that right? It is. Good. Excellent. Now, what we're going to be looking at today, and you will all have a program in the folders which you've been given. Up till the break, we're going to be taking a look at what Ann's is about. Looking at some institutional case studies, which I suspect you will all find very interesting because this is where you will get an opportunity to find out what other people are doing and see whether there are any things around what they're doing that you might like to tap into. We're going to hear about the Australian Research Data Commons and its various relations. We're going to have a break and then we'll work through the program as it's set out there. A break for morning tea, a break for lunch, a break in the afternoon. We've designed the last session of the day so that it should allow plenty of time for questions. So to some extent you may like to keep your questions till then, as I'm fairly sure that along the way some of your questions are going to be answered. However, that is not to stop your eyes asking questions as we go through, but just to let you know that there will be, we hope, adequate time for questions. On the subject of housekeeping, Stephanie Kettis has been handing out video permission forms and if anybody has one which they haven't given back to Stephanie if they could do so, these forms are really quite important. As you can see, the proceedings are being videoed and we do want to make these videos available for sharing later on. They will not be put up on YouTube. You'll be pleased to know. So I think that's all in the housekeeping. Yes, Andrew? Mobile phones. Yes, please. I was at a function once at the Sydney Opera House where they got up and made an announcement that all the staff at the Sydney Opera House had been given special permission to throw people's phones if they rang into the Sydney Harbour. We don't have Sydney Harbour here, but I'm sure we could make a hole in a window and throw them out. I would like to talk a little bit about the ANS partners. How many people here are members already of the ANS partners Google group? A number. Okay. ANS has set up this particular Google group to allow for communications between those people who are working on ANS funded projects. The idea here is to give you a space where you can perhaps ask questions, provide solutions, discuss issues that you might be having. And I will be probably tomorrow for those of you who aren't already members of ANS partners you will probably receive an invitation from me to join up the Google group. In association with the Google group we have our ANS community bulletin board which you will find at community.ans.org.au and this is where we are encouraging people to put up documents which they may wish to share. The bulletin board is already proving to be quite active and this and indeed access to the videos from today will be provided via the bulletin board. There is a website listed there ans.org.au slash partners which will tell you a bit more about the partners and the way that it operates. But we would certainly encourage anybody associated with a data capture project or indeed any other kind of an ANS funded project to join up to this and to take advantage of the opportunity which it provides to communicate with your peers. Now I'm just going to talk a little bit about ANS. I'm presuming that most of the people here do know quite a lot about ANS already. Although perhaps as a source of funding rather than as a source of bringing goodness to the world which is the way we see ourselves. As it says there ANS is an initiative the Australian government being conducted as part of a national collaborative research infrastructure strategy which most of you all know as ENCRS and the Super Science Initiative through EAF the Education Infrastructure Fund. ANS is a collaboration. There are three partners within this collaboration. Monash University who is the lead partner the Australian National University and CSRO. We operate at their offices at Monash. There is another office at ANU where the CSRO people in fact join the ANU people. And ANS now has representatives in I think every other capital city with the exception of Darwin. So ANS is indeed spreading its tentacles quite far and wide and we have here in fact today the ANS representative from Hobart which is nice. Well we do get to see each other quite often although perhaps not often enough. The part of the initiative for ANS or the sorts of things that ANS wanting to do is represented in this statement from Venturis Australia which came out in August two years ago. We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people's heads and labs onto the network and into tools which can help us structure and filter the information. I think within ANS we don't actually see ourselves as being limited to scientific information however that particular statement is very apt in terms of where we do see ourselves progressing. But what we are trying to do is to encourage people to share data, to make their data more broadly available. And for anybody who watched the Gruen Transfer last night I was quite intrigued when they talked about data in an advertising context and I thought hmm I'm not too sure about this one. I suspect that the reasons for the kinds of things we are doing are becoming quite apparent to people. The intensity, the amount of research data is increasing and I'm sure you're being data capture project people you are all very much aware of this because you are collecting data from instruments not just one bit at a time. The problems that people are working on are increasing in scale. We are trying to solve problems around massive issues such as climate water and so on. Part of INCRS investment is trying to enable people to work on some of these huge problems through the platforms of collaboration and there are other organisations which have been set up alongside ANS to help with some of this. Computation is the responsibility of NCI, the National Computational Initiative which is located at the Australian National University. In terms of collaboration there are two groups there receiving funding, the Australian Research Collaboration Yes, what's the S for? Service of course, thank you. And AAF which is dealing with identity issues when people are signing in and out of things. ANS is looking after the data side of things and ANS of course works with institutions and indeed an association with all of these other bodies which have been set up. Early last year the government the government came up with powering ideas, an innovation agenda for the 21st century. The government is very keen, very supportive of the kinds of things we are doing which in fact is precisely why we are doing them. This was released on budget night 2009 in response to the review of the national innovation system and it included recommendations regarding funding of research and research infrastructure. This provided a very significant injection of funding into this system that we're talking about and in particular to ANS but others certainly received additional funding as well. Within that budget we got a $1.1 billion boost for critical areas of scientific endeavour and this slide outlines some of the ways in which that money is being spent and some of the particular discipline areas to which it is going. In particular there's $97 million being put into data storage and collaboration infrastructure and additional $48 million into the Australian data commons which is being implemented by ANS and which Andrew will be talking about very soon and other funds given to other organisations. The development of the Australian research data commons is the particular focus of ANS and as I said Andrew will be talking about that so I don't think I will talk about that in any in any further detail and we are certainly keen to assist with the construction of all of those infrastructure with the development of those infrastructure things which are underway. I'm not going to talk about the research data commons Andrew can talk about that but what does ANS provide well it doesn't just talk about the Australian research data commons it talks about all of those things that go with it. We provide online services, we provide expertise and information, we provide resourcing and most of you here today are recipients of our resourcing initiatives and we also provide policy advocacy which is something I could talk about at length but I won't we're certainly in touch with organisations such as the Australian Research Council the National Health and Medical Research Council with the department itself to look at the frameworks within which all of us are operating and to ensure that there is policy backing for what is being done. This provides you with an opportunity, an opportunity to enable your researchers to publish their data to publicise your research and together to build the data commons so that people do have access to Australia's research data and with that I'd like to pass over to representatives of the organisations here today who will indeed talk to us a little bit about their projects.