Marcos Nino-Ruiz

The Australia urban research gateway

The

The Online What if? Planning Support System

20m Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) began in July 2010. AURIN has been tasked with developing a secure, Web‐based virtual environment (e‐Infrastructure) offering seamless, secure access to diverse, distributed and extremely heterogeneous data sets from numerous agencies with an extensive portfolio of targeted analytical and visualization tools. This is being provisioned for Australia‐wide urban and built environment researchers – itself a highly heterogeneous collection of research communities with diverse demands, through a unified urban research gateway. This paper describes these demands and how the e‐Infrastructure and gateway is being designed and implemented to accommodate this diversity of requirements, both from the user/researcher perspective and from the data provider perspective. The scaling of the infrastructure is presented and the way in which it copes with the spectrum of big data challenges (volume, veracity, variability and velocity) and associated big data analytics. The utility of the e‐Infrastructure is also demonstrated through a range of scenarios illustrating and reflecting the interdisciplinary urban research now possible. Copyright

A data-driven urban research environment for Australia

The chapter introduces the Online What if? (OWI) GIS-based planning support system, which is being made available through the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN). AURIN has been established to provide an advanced information infrastructure to support discipline-specific and multi-disciplinary research and promote sustainable urban development in Australia. OWI is an open source online version of the widely used desktop What if? planning support system developed by Klosterman (1999). OWI enables a range of end users to create and explore what if? land use change scenarios. This chapter discusses OWI in the context of a demonstrator case study in Hervey Bay, Queensland, and introduces future applications of this collaborative planning tool to support the sustainable planning of cities in Australia.

Elastic Scaling of e-Infrastructures to Support Data-Intensive Research Collaborations

The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) is tasked with developing an e-Infrastructure to support urban and built environment research across Australia. As identified in [1], this e-Infrastructure must provide seamless access to highly distributed and heterogeneous data sets from multiple organisations with accompanying analytical and visualization capabilities. The project is tasked with delivering a secure, web-based unifying environment offering a one-stop-shop for Australia-wide urban and built environment research. This paper describes the architectural design and implementation of the AURIN data-driven e-Infrastructure, where data is not just a passive entity that is accessed and used as a consequence of research demand, but is instead, directly shaping the computational access, processing and intelligent utilization possibilities. This is demonstrated in a situational context.

The Online What if? Planning Support System: A Land Suitability Application in Western Australia

For many research endeavours, e-Infrastructures need to provide predictable, on-demand access to large-scale computational resources with high data availability. These need to scale with the research communities requirements and use. One example of such an e-Infrastructure is the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN -- www.aurin.org.au) project, which supports Australia-wide research in and across the urban and built environment. This paper describes the architecture of the AURIN infrastructure and its support for access to distributed (federated) and highly heterogeneous data sets from a wide range of providers. We present how this architecture solution leverages the intersection of high throughput computing (HTC), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Cloud services and big data technologies including use of NoSQL resources. The driving concept in this architecture and the focus of this paper is the ability for scaling up or down depending on resource demands at any given time. This is done automatically and on demand avoiding either under-or over-utilization of resources. This resource-optimization-driven infrastructure has been designed to ensure that peak loads can be predicted and successfully coped with, as well as avoid wasting resources during non-peak times. This overall management strategy has resulted in an e-Infrastructure that provides a flexible, evolving research environment that scales with research needs, rather than providing a rigid (static) end product.