A data-driven urban research environment for Australia

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.