All 12 AAF Mini-grants have completed. The Australian Access Federation would like to congratulate all the recipients of an AAF Mini-grant.

Mini-grant Recipients Round One:

• CSIRO ↓

Mini-grant Recipients Round Two:

• Monash University ↓
• Queensland University of Technology (QUT) ↓
• RMIT Publishing ↓
• Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) ↓
• University of Queensland (UQ) ↓
• University of South Australia (UniSA) ↓

Mini-grant Recipients Round Three:

• The University of Southern Queensland & Automated Patrol Telescopes Australia ↓
• Flinders University ↓
• University of Technology, Sydney ↓
• The University of Queensland ↓
• Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) ↓

CSIRO
AAF Enable AuScope Grid Portal Infrastructure

Project Status: Complete

The AuScope Grid Portal provides access to world-class research infrastructure for earth science through the delivery of a range of technologies and capabilities in data acquisition, management, modelling and simulation across the geospatial and geoscience spectrum. The mini-grant project aims to make the AuScope Grid Portal and associated web based services accessible to users via the Australian Access Federation. This will allow users within the Geosciences community to access services provided by AuScope via their home organisation’s credentials (simplifying user access). Anyone with an AAF Identity Provider account at one of the member host organisations will be granted access to agreed services, minimising authentication effort on the user’s behalf.

• Visit AAF Enable AuScope Grid Portal Infrastructure @ the AAF Wiki →

Monash University
Enhancing Access to ARCS’ Nimrod Service

Project Status: Complete

The Nimrod toolkit manages the execution of parameter sweeps, optimization and experiment design across clusters and grids. It enables overall experiment management, i.e., access to computational resources, distribution of jobs and files, and gathering of results. Parameter sweeps are typical in many scientific and engineering areas, hence the employment of Nimrod in many disciplines, such as cardiac modelling, drug design, econometrics models, aerofoil simulations, quantum chemistry, radiotherapy, crystallography, air traffic control, mathematics, astronomy, imaging systems, and climate studies. The expected outcome of this project is to provide easier access to the Nimrod Portal, drawing more eResearchers into the service and into the Federation. The project aims to greatly improve Nimrod Portal access to researchers, by enabling single sign-on to the Nimrod Portal through home institutions and removing the need for acquiring and managing grid user certificates. Current users include local eResearchers from Monash University, University of Queensland, Griffith University, CSIRO, University of Sydney, as well as international partners from Cranfield University, Oxford University, Stanford University, University of Zurich, Cardiff University, and UC San Diego. A web-based Nimrod Portal at Monash University has been serving local and ARCS users since 2007, but it is not currently Shibbolised.

• Visit Enhancing Access to ARCS Nimrod Service @ the AAF Wiki →

Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
Advanced Shibboleth Integration with Blackboard

Project Status: Complete

Blackboard is a course-management system designed to allow students and faculty to participate in classes delivered online or to use online materials and activities to complement face-to-face teaching. The mini-grant project aims to develop authentication, authorisation and auto-provisioning integration tools for enabling Blackboard in a federated environment. Having Blackboard systems federated at participating universities will enable smooth transition between sites for users because of the federation single sign-on. This will facilitate the delivery of course content from multiple sites in a seamless fashion. Applying the integration tools developed by this project to QUT’s Blackboard will enable the expansion of the content offered to federated users. QUT currently serves the eGrad School content to 5 ATN universities. The number of sites accessing the eGrad School is expected to grow significantly with the introduction of the new integration.

• Visit Advanced Shibboleth Integration with Blackboard @ the AAF Wiki →

RMIT Publishing
Informit AAF Integration

Project Status: Complete

Informit is an online service offering a wide range of database and full content publication products that deliver the vast majority of Australasian scholarly research to the education, research and business sectors. The principal goal of the mini-grant project is to introduce Shibboleth technology to the Informit systems and thus defer access control to the Australian Access Federation. This will initially provide an additional authentication option, and begin the move away from IP address-based access control. The direct benefits to members of AAF include the opportunity for single sign-on access across the variety of services available to them, locally or remotely without reliance EZproxy like technology. By Identity Providers within the federation providing appropriate attributes of users for each session, RMIT Publishing will have greater opportunities to offer personalized services, without having to manage individual accounts and passwords. This in turn will enable a richer and more powerful user-experience for AAF members. Additionally, for Identity Providers, the possibility of more granular usage reports will be enabled.

• Visit the Informit homepage ⇒
• Visit Informit AAF Integration @ the AAF Wiki →

Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC)
TPAC Portal AAF Implementation

Project Status: Complete

The Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) hosts a digital web portal that provides the marine and climate scientific communities with ready access to a large number of heterogeneous and geographically distributed ocean and climate datasets. The portal is being redeveloped to cater for larger amounts of data, and to provide an increasingly powerful search capability to the scientific community. The goal of the mini-grant project is to prototype and enable Australian Access Federation Shibboleth authentication services within the TPAC Digital Library Portal. The project team aims to implement a single sign-on solution that will allow data owners to securely manage their own datasets within the TPAC portal’s administration console. Once logged in, data owners will be able to configure metadata, request notification on usage, and restrict access to datasets. The work will form a subproject within a larger project to enhance the capabilities of the TPAC portal.

• Visit TPAC Portal AAF Implementation @ the AAF Wiki →

University of Queensland (UQ)
PODD – AAF Enablement

Project Status: Complete

The Phenomics Ontology Driven Data repository (PODD) is an open platform that captures, manages, annotates, distributes and publishes the data generated by phenotyping platforms. It supports both the Australian and international biological research communities by providing repository and data publication services. The implementation of Australian Access Federation enabled access and authentication services (and potentially authorisation services) would streamline the service delivery of the PODD by removing a large amount of administrative overhead (i.e. the creation of users) and providing direct access to PODD for a wide range of institutional users without registration delays and without the need to retain an extra sign-on. Being accessible through the AAF is also expected to assist PODD in accessing data publisher metadata and redistributing it as part of the data publication process.

• Visit PODD – AAF Enablement @ the AAF Wiki →

University of South Australia (UniSA)
University IT Benchmarking

Project Status: Complete

The CAUDIT IT Profile and Benchmarking System enables IT Directors and their staff to access and manage University IT departments’ profile data, including major systems in use and benchmarking data, including official government data and university specific information. The primary goal of the mini-grant project is to improve CAUDIT member and wider user accessibility to the CAUDIT IT Profile and Benchmarking System. The grant aims to streamline both authentication using the AAF and authorisation – with functionality for CAUDIT staff to manage read/update access and the ability on demand from the CAUDIT member to grant delegated update access to the benchmarking data. The expected outcomes are wider access and use of IT Profile and Benchmarking data across the Australian and New Zealand Higher Education sector, the data extract facility and canned reports, improved control over access to sensitive data subject to the CAUDIT Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and reduced administrative demands on CAUDIT and UniSA staff.

• Visit University IT Benchmarking @ the AAF Wiki →

The University of Southern Queensland and Automated Patrol Telescopes Australia
telescope-net

Project Status: Complete

telescope-net provides access to online telescopes and observing hardware, astronomical imaging services and other astronomy-related services. With telescope-net, users can request observations and images of any object in the sky, request a session to control a telescope directly via a web browser, see what the telescopes are doing right now, and see currently scheduled requests. The telescope-net system has been shown to be an effective and engaging tool for online astronomy teaching and research. Currently, the major users are undergraduate and postgraduate students of the University of Southern Queensland. Connecting the service to the AAF will improve the user experience and streamline the account setup process for accessing telescope-net. Following federation, the grant recipients intend to expand the service to several other Australian universities.

• Visit Integration of telescope-net @ the AAF Wiki →
•AccessVisit the telescope-net homepage ⇒

Flinders University

AusStage

Project Status: Complete

AusStage is the Australian hub for research on live performance, linking researchers in universities, industry and government. Led by Flinders University, the AusStage project represents a ten-year collaboration between Australian scholars at eighteen universities and partners in government, industry and the collections sector. At its core is the AusStage database of the Australian performing arts, which is now the central repository for the nation’s accumulated knowledge about live performance. The mini-grant has been awarded to provide researchers with federated access to the ‘back end’ administration and editorial areas of AusStage via the AAF. AusStage specific usernames and passwords have proven to be a significant barrier to participation in data curation activities. Integrating with the AAF will make authentication easier. The intention is to increase the number of researchers actively contributing data to AusStage and to increase the number of records entered, edited and updated.

• Visit the AusStage homepage ⇒
• Visit Federating Access to AusStage @ the AAF Wiki →

University of Technology Sydney
Labshare

Project Status: Complete

Traditional engineering teaching laboratories require students to be physically present in the lab in order to interact with equipment, limiting both student flexibility and especially the sharing of facilities between different institutions. Remote labs address these limitations by allowing students to remotely access physical equipment, and hence to carry out experiments on that equipment from any location. The Labshare project is a national initiative being coordinated by UTS, that uses remote labs to support the sharing of engineering teaching laboratories between institutions. The Labshare project’s mission is to create a nationally shared network of remote laboratories that will result in higher quality labs that support greater student flexibility and improved educational outcomes, improved financial sustainability, enhanced scalability in terms of coping with student loads, and are developed and run by those with the best expertise. Labshare will use the AAF to assist in the identification and authorisation of the students, researchers, academic administrators and Laboratory managers from different organisations who will interact with the Labshare system in different ways and with different levels of access.

• Visit the Labshare homepage ⇒
•Visit Labshare Project @ the AAF Wiki →

The University of Queensland
Authenticated Annotation Service for E-Research (AASER)

Project Status: Complete

AASER will provide end users with the ability to securely attach annotations to virtually any web page using only their web browser as the client. Using the AAF, the collaborative annotation service will allow users to securely create and share annotations and replies to annotations on web content for research and educational purposes. These annotations will be visible only to authenticated users and will allow them to raise issues, ask or answer questions, and make comments regarding aspects of the content. Annotations may be attached to an entire web page, a selected region of text on the page, or a selected region of an image embedded in the page. AASER will use the EMMET, DANNO and DANNOTATE services already developed by the eResearch Lab at UQ under the Data Integration and Annotation Service for Biodiversity (DIAS-B) project funded by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). DIAS-B exists primarily to support the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA); see http://ala.org.au. The Atlas of Living Australia is funded through to 2012 under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). It is due for production release in July 2011 and will facilitate access and discovery of biodiversity information and data sets for all Australian flora and fauna.

• Visit Authenticated Annotation Service for E-Research (AASER) @ the AAF Wiki →

Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS)
Sakai

Project Status: Complete

Sakai is a collaboration and learning environment that provides tools to help organise communication and collaborative work. ARCS provides access to Sakai through its Content Developer service. A research group can have one or more project sites that allow users to share files within a team; discuss research issues using a mailing list, threaded forum or real-time chatting; create wikis and blogs; share citations; and add participants to a group. The mini-grant has been awarded to allow access to the Sakai service via the AAF. The technical work undertaken should also lay the groundwork for other Sakai implementations in Australia to connect to the federation.

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• Visit Sakai Project @ the AAF Wiki →