Prof C. Paul Bonnington

This afternoon I will be speaking at a workshop on advanced videoconferencing and collaboration being hosted by the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Canterbury, and sponsored by KAREN.

I’ll be providing an update on the tool called Enabling Virtual Organisations (EVO). And, I’ll be doing this ‘remotely’ from my office at the University of Auckland to an auditorium in Canterbury using EVO itself.

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Data Management can mean different things in different research domains. The tools and methods for managing data in high-energy physics may appear to have no relationship with the data needs of the social scientists. But there are common elements, and a national strategy can focus on those that permeate the many domains in research.

Here I’ve attempted to highlight the many various dimensions to data management and provide further references to some relevant technologies and examples, starting with the core common infrastructure working down to where there are domain-specifics tools and methods. Read more »

This afternoon I have been invited by the Ministry of Research Science and Technology to comment (in a video conference) on the NZ Government’s Digital Strategy from May 2005 and the draft Digital Content Strategy August 2007. The strategy is currently being updated and this exercise ties in to the Digital Future Summit 2.0 conference being held in Auckland next week.

In the May 2005 document, the government sees this strategy as a crucial ingredient in NZ’s journey towards the “Knowledge Society”. The strategy is based around the enablers connection, content and confidence: affordable high-speed connection for everybody, diverse high-quality content, and the building of capability and confidence to use digital resources in our society.

The document promotes the idea of transforming the economy through information and communication. Indeed it even suggests at one point that:

information + communication = knowledge society

What needs to be recognised?

As with anything involving IT these days, the situation has changed three years on. And there are two emerging considerations which I believe need addressing in a digital strategy for New Zealand. Read more »

Yesterday I attended a very nice talk by Prof Edward Vanden Berghe (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA) on OBIS: the Ocean Biogeographic Information System. OBIS publishes, and integrates online, over 13 million locations of 80,000 species from over 230 databases; it is the marine thematic node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. (More about OBIS below).

When discussing the issues and challenges ahead for OBIS, he mentioned a matter that I have pondered for some time: domain-specific data repositories and collections, (which increasingly underpin research in that domain, such as OBIS), will only be sustainable if the researchers get academic recognition for providing their datasets for the collection. This relates to researcher motivation…. Read more »

Professor Edwina Cornish, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Research), Monash University has formally announced my appointment as Professor and Director of the Monash e-Research Centre.

I will be moving to Melbourne with my family at the end of the year to take up the position January 2008.

I wish to thank all my colleagues in the Department of Mathematics and the University of Auckland for their support and friendship over the past 15 years. I have felt very supported in my activities (particularly with new initiatives in the IT area) at Auckland, and it was a very difficult decision for me to move on. I am hopeful that this move is an opportunity for new collaborations, particularly in eResearch, between Auckland, New Zealand (through BeSTGRID) and Monash.

Professor Edwina Cornish’s announcement to all staff at Monash University: Read more »