Arcitecta News

Major New Version of Mediaflux Available Soon

04-Mar-2013 00:00:00

Version 3.8 of Mediaflux, to be released soon, contains major storage orchestration enhancements as well as other improvements.

Take data to the compute or ... take compute to the data

The Mediaflux pledge for data to be easily found and delivered to the right place at the right time takes on additional significance.

Mediaflux now supports multiple storage pools, with multiple copies of data, policy driven distribution, affinities, cloud storage, prioritised I/O, and virtual storage tiers that can be dynamically added and removed.

Together, the new capabilities add up to unprecedented flexibility managing data locality, for both redundancy and affinity purposes.

Content Store for Amazon S3 Cloud Storage

A new Content Store type has been added to support asset content on Amazon S3 cloud storage. The store includes support for quota management to allow multiple stores per S3 account, as well as support for proactive high-water response.

Content Store Policies

Content Store Policies have been introduced to allow for the automated distribution of assets across multiple storage sources, whether local or remote. A policy is comprised of the set of potential content stores and a policy type. Policy types include balanced, round robin and waterfall.

These features can be used to balance data amongst a group of content stores, round robin data between stores, or automatically spill data to another store when a store fills, offering tremendous flexibility in the movement and location of data.

Content Store Affinities

The content for an asset can now be stored in more than one Content Store. This allows content to be duplicated in multiple Content Stores (which may be at different locations) for redundancy and affinity purposes.

Prioritised Store I/O

Prioritised Store I/O allows the order of I/O requests to be altered. It is very useful when multi-tier storage is in use and can be configured to prevent overflow of the disk cache, leading to poor I/O performance.

Content Store High Water Mark

Content Stores now support high water mark level service calls, where a specified service may be called when a high water mark is reached. The service can take any action required, whether remedial, notification, or some other action.

Virtual Namespace Hierarchies

A Virtual Namespace Hierarchy is an indexed collection of assets generated dynamically based on metadata.

Virtual Namespace Hierarchies are a dynamic form of namespace that are fast to query, due to indexing, and can be exposed by the Mediaflux NFS server or as an Arcitecta Asset File System. Virtual Namespace Hierarchies allow the same asset to appear in multiple namespaces, depending on its metadata.

UNSW Selects Mediaflux (LiveArc)

06-Feb-2013 00:00:00

The University of New South Wales aims to be the best university in Australia for data intensive research.

Research Data Storage is one of five strategic priorities for the university from 2013 to 2015, and LiveArc has been selected to implement the “smart-catalogue”, providing access to appropriate data stores; an enhanced “smart-data” functionality which provides discoverability, integration, metadata and a reporting capability for the store.

Initially, LiveArc's Asset File System capability will provide ingest and egest for research data, to be followed by the use of LiveArc's sophisticated analysis and bundling technology for specialised use cases.

CAReHR destined for Royal Children's Hospital

06-Feb-2013 00:00:00

Two new CAReHR (Clinical Audit Research electronic Health Record) instances will be deployed at the Royal Children's Hospital (RCH).

The Department of Health in Victoria will use CAReHR for the Pathways to Good Health project, providing health assessments for children entering out of home care. The system will be hosted at RCH.

In addition, the RCH has approved the adoption of CAReHR for the hospital's Immigrant Health Service.

CAReHR is a fully configurable electronic health record, providing:

A clinician configurable electronic health record
Computerised clinical notes, summaries, pathology requests and prescribing
One-click creation of GP and patient summary information, including translated problem lists.

This system is designed to improve workflow efficiency and patient care, while complying with patient privacy standards and dovetailing with the existing scanned medical record used at RCH.

The CAReHR instance at the Royal Melbourne Hospital Victorian Infectious Diseases Service (VIDS) has recently undergone a major capability upgrade, where it has been in use since April 2012.

Stay tuned for further CAReHR news in the next few months!

Defence Replication Services Upgraded

04-Dec-2012 00:00:00

New replication features are now in use by the Australian Department of Defence. Replication is used to automatically mirror a large data store between two sites and to replicate selected data to and from a number of remote and field locations.

Some data is replicated directly via the network, and some, where the quantity of data and network bandwidth are not compatible, is by "air gap". Metadata is replicated immediately, and content is replicated by physical transportation of disk or tape, and "catches up" with and is synchronised with the metadata some time later. Other data is replicated "by reference". Metadata is replicated immediately, and content is retrieved by the remote server on demand, when required.

No matter what the physical constraints, Mediaflux has a solution.

The ready access to important data has been well received by field locations. Mediaflux replication services have been able to deliver functionality that some locations have been waiting on for a number of years.

Arcitecta Asset File System Now Available

05-Nov-2012 00:00:00

For many decades now a fundamental method for organising data has been to store it in discrete units called files. In turn files have been organised into directories, or folders. The volume of data, both in terms of the number of files and the size of files makes this increasingly untenable.

Mediaflux can store data transparently to users (and can also store by reference), but makes any part of it rapidly discoverable by leveraging the power of metadata.

Legacy applications however may still require a file system interface: the Arcitecta Asset File System (AAFS) allows Mediaflux managed data to appear as if it were stored in a simple file system hierarchy of directories and files.

Mediaflux is a bridge between the old world of directories and files and the new world of data and metadata.

Data is ingested into Mediaflux by simply copying to the AAFS. As always, metadata is automatically extracted and generated upon ingest, thereby facilitating subsequent rapid discovery using Mediaflux’s rich query capabilities and Arcitecta Desktop. Data is egested by simply copying from the AAFS file system.

AAFS may be clustered, allowing multiple servers to share the ingest and egest load.

AAFS is available now in Mediaflux version 3.7.039 and later.

See AAFS for more information.

Mediaflux Replication Services Improved

05-Nov-2012 00:00:00

Mediaflux replication is an important feature, allowing copies of data to be replicated across multiple servers. Replication can be used to localise data to reflect access patterns, improve performance, or implement data protection policies.

Mediaflux 3.7.039 introduces some significant improvements to replication features:

Replication policy can specify that content should be replicated "by reference". Only metadata is replicated immediately, and the content is retrieved by the remote server on demand, when required
There is a new content status ("remote") which indicates the content is located in a remote server
There is a new "source" attribute on metadata fragments which (if set) indicates which source server generated that metadata
There are several enhancements and fixes to allow metadata and/or content to be modified in different servers and cross-replicated.
Replication by reference allows network bandwidth to be optimised. Replication policies can be scheduled to replicate metadata frequently, but replicate content only at certain periods (e.g. overnight) when network utilisation is low.

See Mediaflux Federation Services for full details.

Two Papers and an iPad at eResearch Australasia

28-Oct-2012 00:00:00

eResearch is focused on how information and communications technologies help researchers to collect, manage, share, process, analyse, store, find, and re-use information. The annual eResearch Australasia conference, held recently in Sydney, connects practitioners and researchers sharing experiences in this domain.

Mediaflux is an excellent example of technology that delivers on these objectives, with two illustrative and informative papers, co-authored by Jason Lohrey, Arcitecta CTO, being delivered at the conference:

Dr. Karrie Rose from the Taronga Conservation Society presented "Building a Wildlife Health Research Community: From Field to Pathogen Discovery", which described the important work accelerating the process of identifying and understanding emerging wildlife based pathogens.
Dr. Neil Killeen from the Centre for Neuroscience Research and ITS Research at the University of Melbourne presented "Melding Data Management with Computational Workflows", which described the innovative integration of data management and computational workfow technology.

Arcitecta participated with SGI at the conference exhibition. The booth was always busy and featured an iPad mini giveaway. The iPad mini was won by Rajesh Chhabra of Altair Engineering. Congratulations Rajesh!

Arcitecta at GEOINT 2012

18-Oct-2012 00:00:00

The annual GEOINT Symposium, hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, is the U.S.A.’s preeminent intelligence event of the year.

This year’s event, from October 8-11, was held at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando and included an expansive exhibit hall of more than 100,000 square feet with more 200 organizations showcasing their capabilities.

Arcitecta participated with its partner SGI, with presentations and demonstrations of LiveArc to many conference attendees over the 3 days of the exhibition.

LiveArc’s large data ingest, packaging and metadata extraction, along with geospatial discovery features were well received, with numerous opportunities for follow up over the coming months.

eScience Conference Paper

27-Sep-2012 00:00:00

The 8th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2012) will be held in Chicago from 8-12 October 2012.

A paper titled "Integration of modern data management practice with scientific workflows" and co-authored by Neil Killeen, Jason Lohrey, Michael Farrell, Wilson Liu, Slavisa Garic, David Abramson and Gary Egan has been accepted for presentation. The paper will describe ongoing work as part of the ARC linkage funded project with Monash University and the University of Melbourne.

Arcitecta paper at HIC2012

16-Aug-2012 00:00:00

Arcitecta again presented at Australia's premier health informatics conference this year. HIC2012 ran from 30 July to 2 August in Sydney, and the paper, describing the Specialist Refugee Health eHR application recently deployed at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, was well received.

New Technical Notes Available Now

08-May-2012 00:00:00

Technical Notes continue to be created and updated. Each note documents a particular topic, and can be readily updated to ensure the latest information is always available. Over time, the Technical Notes portfolio will build up into the authoritative source for comprehensive technical information. The following new notes are now available.

FILTERS

While assets can be easily located using text only searching, filters provide a way of finding assets based on specific attributes. This Technical Note describes how to construct filters in Asset Finder and Asset Map.

The Asset Map Technical Note has also been updated.

MEDIAFLUX DATA RECOVERY

This technical note outlines the technologies recommended for implementing and maintaining a data recovery solution for Mediaflux. The following topics are discussed:

Backing up and Restoring the Mediaflux Database;
Archiving and Restoring Mediaflux Assets;
Recovering Asset Archives to a native file system.

MEDIAFLUX ASSET PATH LANGUAGE

The Asset Path Language (APL) is a language that is used by the service asset.path.generate to generate a file path based on asset metadata. These paths are often generated when exporting data for some purpose. The technical note describes the structure of the language and provides examples of usage.

OTHER TECHNICAL NOTES CURRENTLY AVAILABLE

Mediaflux POSIX File System 0.1
Mediaflux File Compilation Profile 1.6.1
Mediaflux Storage Workflows 1.0
Mediaflux Data Replication 1.0
Asset Map 1.1.

Specialist Refugee eHR Deploys

24-Apr-2012 00:00:00

The Specialist Refugee eHR, a new Mediaflux client application, has been deployed at the Victorian Infectious Disease Service at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. The project was commissioned by the Department of Medicine at the University of Melbourne.

The core objective of the Specialist Refugee eHR is to:

Provide point of care decision support to clinicians;
Provide an intuitive interface summarising patient information across visits;
Reduce information duplication;
Include a mechanism for providing patient held records;
Facilitate evaluation and clinical research.

The ultimate goal is better health, and health service delivery for this patient group.

The key point of innovation is that the system is configurable. Clinicians can adapt the eHR to the specific needs of their patient group, clinical service, or research questions, and change these parameters over time as necessary, without losing data integrity or recourse to Arcitecta. This is a significant advance in implementation and sustainability.

Plans are underway for rollout to a further three participating hospitals across three health networks. In addition, funding has been received for a follow on project integrating primary care and specialist information systems providing care across the patient’s health journey.

Arcitecta Desktop Powers On

22-Mar-2012 00:00:00

Version 1.0.20 of Arcitecta Desktop is now available. This version continues to improve on features and convenience, making Arcitecta Desktop simpler to use and more powerful than ever.

REFERENCE IMAGES

In Asset Map, arbitrary images may now be used as a background map. Previously only images of the entire world could be used. The geographical feature database is automatically restricted to the extent of the map, so that only features within the map boundaries will be suggested.

Images of any resolution can be used, allowing the user the flexibility and convenience to choose a map offering a macro view or micro view as needed. Image tiling and pyramiding continues to be available.

FILTERS

The mechanism to create filters has been enhanced. A filter selector is available that allows sophisticated filters to be quickly constructed. The selector displays a list of potential filters that may be dragged to the filter box including:

Metadata documents and/or elements;
Global filters, such as asset create and modify time;
Geoshape attributes such as point, type and datum;
Point and radius – filters assets based on a specified distance from a specified point;
Created/modified by the user.

The filter selector is available in both Asset Map and Asset Finder.

SAVED VIEWS

Views can now include a chosen layout (e.g. grid with selected columns, or tiles) and a filter. The view can be saved to the favourites area by dragging the view name from the “Open View” menu and dropping it to the favourites area. The name of the view is displayed with a special filter icon.

Mediaflux 3.7 Releases

22-Mar-2012 00:00:00

Mediaflux 3.7 is now available and supports native DMF* code on 64-bit x86 Linux platforms. There are new services to “pin” or retain content for optimised access. For DMF, this translates to a policy to keeps this content online above all others.

Native support means that context switching to perform DMF operations is no longer required.

In order to run in native mode an additional package (DMF - native) must be installed. If the native DMF driver is not installed, then the DMF driver will be the default (dmattr, dmget, dmput, etc.) driver. The driver in use is reported when describing a DMF based content store. Mediaflux 3.7 also includes numerous other enhancements:

Improved authentication tracing;
Improved shopping cart services;
Transaction concurrency improvements - content analysis for asset update is now outside a transaction and triggers no longer run within an atomic transaction;
File Compilation Profile enhancements, including “file depth”;
It is now possible to create an asset using URL by value and specify a directory. If this is done, then the directory will be automatically converted to an asset archive (AAR);
The type of a content store can be changed, e.g. a file system content store to/from a DMF content store.

*DMF is a trademark or registered trademark of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries.

Join the Team! Arcitecta is Hiring

10-Feb-2012 00:00:00

Contact: Jason Lohrey, Chief Technology Officer
E-Mail: jobs@arcitecta.com

Candidate Profile

Arcitecta is currently seeking high calibre people that have the capacity to produce leading edge and innovative commercial data management software products in a technically challenging research and development environment.

This profile describes Arcitecta, the types of products and services we produce and defines the types of people and skills we are seeking to build an enjoyable, technically stimulating and rewarding enterprise.

ABOUT ARCITECTA

Arcitecta is a technology and software company based in Melbourne, Australia. It was founded in 1998. We develop data management products and our core product is the data operating system, Mediaflux™. There are products that partially overlap with Mediaflux, but as far as we are aware there are no comparable products or competitors.

Arcitecta has customers in Australia and overseas - Mediaflux is sold to a global market by both Arcitecta and by our reseller, SGI. SGI markets Mediaflux under the brand name LiveArc™. Mediaflux is also embedded in and distributed by OEM partners.

Arcitecta places core emphasis on goal-oriented innovation - a significant portion of revenue is reinvested into research and development. By "goal-oriented" we mean focused on achieving valuable and differentiated product and capabilities through innovation. Rather than an aggregation of existing technologies, the vast majority of our technology is our own. We rely on people with the ability to solve complex problems and create new technologies from first-principles, if required. We take this approach for a number of reasons, including: a) to ensure we can develop leading and differentiated product and b) to ensure we maximize our ability to provide rapid and high levels of customer support. Whilst unique, our technologies do present themselves through standard interfaces - we have "open proprietary" technology.

We engage directly with our customers and their end-users often by working on-site. We work closely with the academic and research community, through programmes such as ARC Linkage.

PROBLEM SPACES

Our technology operates on laptops through to large systems with potentially thousands of CPUs. It operates in environments requiring kilobytes per second I/O through to gigabytes per second I/O. There may be a few thousand persistent objects through to billions (or more) of persistent objects in single and/or federated environments. Single data objects may have no "data" or might have 20TB or more per object.

Just about every conceivable computational problem will be encountered and through our customers there is the potential to be involved in almost any discipline.

Here are some example software components that are part of the Arcitecta product offering:

XML encoded object database engine
Fuzzy n-dimensional spatial indexes
GWT Widget Toolkit for browser based user interfaces
FTP and GridFTP server
DICOM server
Web Server
Distributed SOA architecture
POSIX compliant file-system
MPEG-2 de-muxer and stream analyzer

There are many more capabilities - these few illustrate scale and diversity.

Some of these are "standard" capabilities such as our web-server that implements RFC2616, RFC 2617, etc. implemented in-house for complete control, through to entirely unique capabilities such as our XML encoded object database, XODB which is extremely fast and compact - it is exponentially faster than relational databases with complex queries (and often not so complex queries).

Candidate Characteristics and Capabilities

We are looking for computer scientists and software engineers with a flair for creativity combined with methodological rigour. We are seeking people who are both innovative and outcome focused, are able to excel with any computational problem, and relish creating products that people enjoy using.

APTITUDE

Demonstrated capacity to tackle any problem
Outcome focused
Creative and methodical
Capacity for strategic and tactical thinking and planning
Technology leader
Demonstrated capacity to acquire and apply new skills
Financially acute

ABSTRACTION AND DESIGN

Ability to distil abstractions and clearly express and convey them to others
Object-oriented design, patterns and component construction

COMMUNICATION

Gregarious and considered communicator
Ability to convey complex problems simply to non-technical people
Ability to convey complex problems simply to technical people and be able to participate in and respond to peer review

TECHNOLOGY COMPETENCIES

Diversity of platforms including both Linux (most variants) and Windows
Core languages of Java (SE), C++ and C, but ability to utilize any other language as appropriate
XML and associated standards
Networking
Multi-threading, high performance compute and I/O

QUALIFICATIONS

PhD or Masters degree in Computer Science, or demonstrated equivalence
5+ years software development in commercial environments

PROJECTS

We are looking for people to work on one or more projects that initially include:

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) CS, WMS and WFS protocol implementations
Clustered versioned file systems
Video and image processing pipelines
Distributed clinical systems

Immigrant Health Clinical Hub Project

07-Nov-2011 00:00:00

Arcitecta will be a key developer for the Immigrant Health Clinical Hub – a Model for Integrated Clinical Care using High Capacity Broadband, funded by the Victorian Department of Business and Innovation.

The project is an initiative under the Victorian Government's Broadband-Enabled Innovation Program, that funds innovative projects to develop new ways of working and improving service delivery in business, government and the community through the use of high-capacity broadband.

Participants include Melbourne Health, along with Precedence Health Care, Arcitecta, the Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society and stakeholders in hospitals and primary care services across Victoria.

Around 3,500 people of a refugee background arrive in Victoria each year under the humanitarian program; half are aged 19 years or less. This group of Victorians requires specific health screening for infectious diseases and nutritional deficiencies after they arrive, and many refugees will have multiple and/or complex health conditions, and require medium or long-term follow-up. Typically they will see both a primary care provider (General Practitioner) and a specialist.

The project will develop a web-based Clinical Hub to create a path of efficient hospital – primary care communication that is secure, sustainable and supported by clinical stakeholders across the sector. The Clinical Hub will transform service delivery in refugee health by:

• Addressing the communication gap between primary care and specialists by providing GPs with immediate secure access to specialist care records and providing a simple and convenient way to create Care Plans, and allowing secure specialist access to these plans

• Providing GPs with technology for real time communication with their patients, specialists, interpreters, and allied health providers

Providing mobile phone reminders for patient appointments
Creating a mechanism to provide simple clinical summaries for patients in their own language
Creating a database of de-identified population data to allow evaluation of service delivery and to implement and monitor evidence based health care.

The Hub will leverage the Arcitecta developed and award winning Clinical Viewer. The project is synergistic with Arcitecta's culture of technology innovation and looking beyond the current horizon to further Australia's e-Health outcomes.

Arcitecta Shares Award

15-Aug-2011 00:00:00

Arcitecta is proud to be a joint recipient of the Don Walker Efficiency Award announced at the hic2011 e-Health and Health Informatics conference in Brisbane.

The award relates to the Clinical Viewer developed by Arcitecta in collaboration with Biogrid, which supports viewing cancer patient data across organisations over the Internet, and the joint recipients were Arcitecta, BioGrid Australia, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Radiation Oncology Victoria, the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and the University of Melbourne.

The Don Walker award recipients have demonstrated that their work has improved patient outcomes through the use of innovative technological solutions, reducing the unit cost of diagnostics and treatment, improving administrative processes, or improving throughput.

Dr Don Walker is a pioneer in the application of computers in Australian health care. With an untiring commitment to the field that spanned decades, Don has made a major contribution to Australian Health Informatics, particularly in the area of terminology.

The conference is organised annually by HISA, a scientific society established in 1992 for health informaticians and those with an interest in health informatics. HISA aims to improve health through health informatics. It provides a national focus for the science and practice of health informatics.

This year's conference focus was the Transformative Power of Innovation which reverberates with Arcitecta’s culture of technology innovation and looking beyond the current horizon to further Australia’s e-Health outcomes.

DaRIS Links to Monash Biomedical Imaging

03-Aug-2011 00:00:00

Work is proceeding apace under the ARC Linkage Projects collaboration with the University of Melbourne and Monash University. The PSSD subject-centric scientific data management application (now known as DaRIS), initially deployed by the Centre for Neuroscience at the University of Melbourne, has been enhanced to utilise the new Arcitecta widget toolkit. It will soon include a graphical viewer and editor for experimental workflows, and computational workflow integration will follow.

DaRIS is now deployed at Monash University and utilises the large research data store (LaRDS). This instance receives content replicated from the Melbourne University DaRIS node. However, in the near future, it is expected that it will also manage primary image data acquired through the MR and PET imaging scanners at the Monash Biomedical Imaging Laboratories. The existing integration with MASSIVE will be further enhanced so that data are efficiently transferred and processed (in I/O and compute intensive processes) generating 3 and 4 dimensional images.

The data flow will be implemented for the Monash Biomedical Imaging (MBI) Laboratories, a newly established biomedical imaging research centre led by Professor Gary Egan. The MBI facilities are being co-located with the Imaging and Medical Beamline (IMBL) that is currently under construction at the Australian Synchrotron. The joint MBI-IMBL facilities will provide internationally unique research opportunities for synchrotron and biomedical researchers from Australia and overseas. This will be the only integrated synchrotron imaging and multi-modality (MRI/PET/SPECT) biomedical imaging research facility worldwide.

TPAC Translation Services

03-Aug-2011 00:00:00

The Translation Services project, managed by the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC), is part of the Marine and Climate Data Discovery and Access Project (MACDDAP) funded under the NCRIS program. The project seeks to minimize the effort and cost to convert substantial quantities of data to different metadata standards. The Translation Services have initially been applied to conforming catalogues from THREDDS to NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Convention, providing a significant cost saving for anyone to translate these types of data.

Recent improvements include support for long running jobs (sometimes a job that is translating hundreds of thousands of files will run for some weeks), self provisioning and the notification of completion of jobs.

The service may be accessed at https://mediaflux.sf.utas.edu.au/translation. TPAC is using the translation services to conform and republish marine and climate data collections through the TPAC digital library portal https://dl.tpac.org.au/tpacportal/.

For information about the service, contact jason.lohrey@arcitecta.com or peter.blain@utas.edu.au.

BioGrid Clinical Viewer at Health Informatics Conference

21-Jul-2011 00:00:00

The BioGrid Australia Clinical Viewer is now being trialled by clinicians. Arcitecta has been working with BioGrid to create a browser-based application that allows a clinician to view colorectal clinical data for a patient, regardless of the institution that holds the data. The application uses a federation of Mediaflux servers that harvest data from local BioGrid databases. Clinicians can refer patients to providers in other institutions, and grant permission for those other providers to view patient data from their institution.

The Clinical Viewer will be presented at the upcoming Health Informatics Conference (HIC) in Brisbane on 1-4 August. Please refer to www.hisa.org.au/hic2011 for further details.

ABIN WildHealth Launch in July

21-Jul-2011 00:00:00

The launch of the WildHealth project will be conducted at the Taronga Zoo at the end of July. The event will commence with a presentation from Emeritus Professor Gary Wobeser, the co-founder of the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre, to be followed by the launch by Professor Helen Garnett (ABIN Chair) and Cameron Kerr (Director and Chief Executive of the Taronga Conservation Society). Training in use of the WildHealth system will then take place.

WildHealth offers a collaborative platform open to biosecurity professionals, universities, scientists, researchers, environment departments, veterinarians, zoos and aquaria. Specific disease outbreaks can be tracked and documented by linking the database to generic maps to consider factors such as vegetation, topography, human use of land, and transport corridors.

The WildHealth application was built by Arcitecta using Mediaflux as a platform, based on the functionality of a database gifted from the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre. According to Dr. Karrie Rose, the manager of the Australian Registry of Wildlife Health, "from an administrative perspective it is much easier to be administering one on-line database, rather than multiple nodes of an Access database", and "there are features of this system such as drag and drop technology which allow us to re-classify just as quickly as the taxonomers do which is incredibly valuable".

Refugee Health Clinical Hub

02-May-2011 00:00:00

Arcitecta has signed an agreement with the Department of Medicine at the University of Melbourne to develop and deploy a Refugee Health Clinical Hub. The Hub is designed to assist clinicians to improve outcomes for immigrants and refugees in Victoria and presents a model for integrated clinical care able to utilise the emerging NBN. The Hub will be based on Mediaflux.

Over the last twelve years there have been over 120,000 Humanitarian entrants to Australia, of which over 25 per cent have settled in Victoria. Clinical care for refugees and immigrants can be challenging due to the complexity of their medical problems, which may include infectious diseases and nutritional deficiencies.

The project will develop a multi-site web-based clinical information management system across specialist adult and child refugee services in Victoria. It will provide point of care decision support to clinicians, improve follow-up of patients, and permit practice evaluation and clinical research with the ultimate goal of better health and health services for this patient group. It will also enable improved sharing of information with patients, with the expected outcomes of increased understanding of and adherence to treatment and greater health system efficiency.

The Clinical Hub will service both clinical and research needs within the one federated system, removing the need to build separate clinical and research systems. The moment a user (e.g. clinician) creates a new disease template it will be available (in de-identified form) for authorised researchers to use.

The Clinical Hub will initially be deployed at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, with deployments to follow at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Barwon Health and the Dandenong Hospital.

Deepening Knowledge and Innovation through Design Practices

05-Apr-2011 00:00:00

Arcitecta CTO Jason Lohrey recently attended the RMIT Design Research Institute's second symposium in the annual Design Research and Practice series concerned with transdisciplinary research and practice.

The first forum in 2009 discussed the nature of wicked problems and the need for breadth in addressing them. The second forum, held in March 2011, explored the associated need for deep practice: How do we deepen knowledge and innovation through design practice and embedded practice?

Mr. Lohrey’s perspective on data architectures and next generation data analytics contributed to the discussion.

The forum is co-convened by Mark Burry, Professor of Innovation and Director of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at RMIT and Terry Cutler, Principal, Cutler & Company, and attended by leading professionals and academics from throughout the region.

ABIN WildHealth Community Space Demonstration Video

07-Mar-2011 00:00:00

The WildHealth Community Space is made available by the Australian Biosecurity Intelligence Network WildHealth proof of concept project, and a new video demonstrating its features has been released. The community space enables sharing wildlife data across the sector and is available to researchers nationally to connect on-line, share resources and share data to help protect the natural world, our own health and the agricultural economy.

The on-line database of the Australian Registry of Wildlife Health, developed by Arcitecta, is now integrated within WildHealth. The database is a highly detailed laboratory information management system for wildlife and features mapping capabilities. Incorporation of national animal health data standards within the database is the key to sharing wildlife heath data across sectors.

The video can be viewed on YouTube.

Arcitecta CTO presents to SGI DMF Users Group

07-Mar-2011 00:00:00

Arcitecta CTO Jason Lohrey delivered a keynote presentation at the recent SGI DMF Users Group meeting at Monash University. The presentation was titled "Managing Your Digital Assets - The Crown Jewels", and discussed aspects of traditional file systems, structured databases and digital asset management.

A digital asset embodies an organisation's intellectual property, must often be accessible for a long time, needs open standards for exchange and may need to be repurposed in ways not previously envisaged. The present SGI LiveArc and DMF integration was described and a new "Archive File System" concept was outlined. The Archive File System will be able to "change shape" based on a user's authority, and view configuration, and automatically provide data to users in a transformed state.

New Web Site Goes Live

14-Feb-2011 00:00:00

This month reveals the launch of Arcitecta's new revitalised web site. The web site is the first development of Arcitecta's recent expansion, with new branding, new marketing materials, and new training materials in the pipeline.

New Team Members Underpin Arcitecta Expansion

17-Jan-2011 00:00:00

The New Year welcomes Lauren Burns and Peter Cross who will add to the skill set available to Arcitecta.

Lauren Burns from Lotus Digital brings significant expertise in design and will be responsible for brand development, including a soon to be launched new web site, the development of materials for marketing, training and trade shows, as well as project management and client liaison. A multi skilled team member!

Peter Cross joins Arcitecta after 15 years at SGI and will be responsible for all business development activities. Peter will work closely with SGI to ensure the continued successful sale and deployment of LiveArc based solutions to SGI customers as well as working with existing Mediaflux customers.

Jason Lohrey, Arcitecta CTO will continue to connect with customers. The increased skill set of the Arcitecta team will underpin accelerated growth, and the capacity to develop new product, and will be of significant benefit to all customers.

Translation Services Web Site Launched

10-Nov-2010 00:00:00

The standards for describing research (and other) data are evolving constantly. For each new, or evolved, standard there are millions of data sets that need to be conformed. The cost for achieving conformance can be high, particularly when manual intervention is required. The Translation Services project managed by the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) seeks to minimize the effort and cost for converting to different metadata standards. The Translation Services have initially been applied to conforming THREDDS catalogs to NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Convention. This provides a significant cost saving for anyone to translate these types of data. In future, input and output "drivers" will be created for other standards such as ISO 19115 and OGC, etc. and for standards yet to be created.

The web site is available to authorized users at https://mediaflux.sf.utas.edu.au/translation/.

Further details can be found in the Translation Services Poster.

This project is supported by the National eResearch Architecture Taskforce (NeAT), The Australian National Data Service (ANDS), Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) in collaboration with the University of Tasmania and Arcitecta Pty Ltd.

NIF Deploys Mediaflux to Two More Nodes

14-Oct-2010 00:00:00

The National Imaging Facility (NIF) provides state-of-the-art imaging of animals, plants and materials for the Australian research community. NIF member, the Florey Neuroscience Institutes, was an early adopter of Mediaflux, deploying the platform in 2006, and subsequently developing the Project Subject Study Dataset (PSSD) client to manage dataflow in its MRI based repository. This is now being extended to two additional sites, the Centre for Advanced Imaging at the University of Queensland and Monash University, in a distributed topology that will allow collaborators to easily manage and share datasets.

NUS, KNMI and ICR adopt LiveArc

08-Sep-2010 00:00:00

Arcitecta's reseller, SGI has won business at three new accounts in Asia and Europe.

The National University of Singapore (NUS), the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in the U.K. and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) have signed up for LiveArc solutions.

The National University of Singapore's Centre for BioImaging Sciences is developing state-of-the-art imaging and computational approaches to important problems in biology. The centre includes a number of optical microscopes, some of which are capable of generating 250,000 or more files in a single experiment. Data sets are large, ranging from 10GB - 1TB, and need to be stored and analysed, so having a system which optimises compute, memory, I/O bandwidth and storage, and delivers both capacity and performance, is important.

LiveArc will ingest and organise the source files, converting them from the proprietary formats of microscope manufacturers to standard OME-TIFF format. Metadata is automatically extracted, and can be used to support subsequent searches and to control routing the required data to the correct location for processing and transformation.

KNMI will use LiveArc to add a metadata management capability for their meteorology data and ICR will use LiveArc to manage genomics data.

All three sites will be installed and up and running in early 2011.

ARC Linkage Project

12-Aug-2010 00:00:00

Building on work over the past 4 years with the Neuroimaging and Neuroinformatics group at the University of Melbourne, Arcitecta will collaborate with the University of Melbourne and Monash University to develop new tools for neuroimaging research, including efficient distributed infrastructure and workflow capabilities and semantic tools using existing ontological frameworks and specific neuroimaging ontologies. These new capabilities will significantly enhance the productivity of neuroimaging research.

A significant portion of the new capability will be based on Mediaflux.

The project received funding of $360,000 over 3 years from the Australian Government Australian Research Council (ARC) under the Linkage Projects program and will commence in 2011.