The Urban Data Re-use and Integration Platform for Australia: Design, Realisation, and Case Studies

Many/most of the challenges facing urban researchers and indeed policy makers relate to discovery of, access to and subsequent use of heterogeneous urban data sets. These data are typically held by a myriad of government agencies (local, State and Federal), industry and academic research organisations. The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project commenced in 2010 and was tasked specifically with addressing this issue for the Australian urban research community. Specifically it was tasked with developing an e-Infrastructure providing seamless, secure live access to an extensive, extensible, and diverse collection of (typically) pre-existing data from autonomous and definitive data providers, where here "live" implies that the data is held by organizations and programmatic access to the data in situ is supported. The AURIN platforms currently provides access to over 1800 data sets from over 60 major organisations across Australia with over 100 targeted tools offering best practice analytics and visualization of data. These data sets can be combined in a multitude of ways reflecting urban research challenges/needs. This paper describes the design of the platform and its support for data re-use, data integration and associated data analytics and visualisation. We illustrate the flexibility of the system through case studies highlighting typical aggregate-level data re-use and integration of data from multiple independent agencies and in supporting novel disaggregated (unit-level) data re-use.