The Urban Research Gateway for Australia: Development of a Federated, Multi-disciplinary Research e-Infrastructure

The $20m Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) began in July 2010. AURIN is developing a secure, web-based virtual environment (e-Infrastructure) a lab-in-a-browser offering access to diverse, distributed and extremely heterogeneous data sets together with an extensive portfolio of targeted analytical and visualization tools. This is being provisioned for Australiawide urban and built environment researchers – itself a highly heterogeneous collection of research communities with diverse demands. This paper describes these demands and their associated needs and expectations on the e-Infrastructure and illustrates through a range of working examples how the eInfrastructure allows inter-disciplinary research collaborations to take place. An overview of the e-Infrastructure itself is provided and how it allows tackling these demands.