Intersect News #29 February 2011

luke
3 Mar 2011

Environmental Metabolomics project delivered

Intersect has deployed the Environmental Metabolomics Information System (EMIS) for the University of Sydney. The EMIS provides an online capability for recording and sharing information about metabolites discovered in samples of plants and soil. The system enables handling of greater data volumes, centralising all experiment data in one place, and significantly improving the ability to search and share the entire set of historical data as well as perform detailed analysis.

The EMIS will increase the productivity of researchers by requiring less manual effort, and enabling access to the public and other researchers, consequently improving collaboration. The system was developed by Intersect for the University of Sydney as part of the eResearch program, funded through the ICT Tools and Frameworks for Research Collaboration.

N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium development completed

The N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium project created a new web-based herbarium system to manage the ‘lifecycle’ of plant specimens at the University of New England’s internationally recognised N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium, making this significant collection of nearly 100,000 plant specimens far more discoverable, and its database more useable and manageable.

The new web-based relational database provides easy access for multiple users, with defined privileges, both on and off campus. Authorised users are able to edit data, to enter new specimens records which conform to Australian HISCOM standards and output the data in the range of required formats for production of labels, interrogation of data, delivery of data across the web. The risk of accidental data loss has been eliminated and data errors reduced with look up tables and authoritative name libraries. The chance of incorrect data being entered has greatly lessened with a user-friendly interface for data entry, including auto complete functions and web-based spelling checkers. The arduous process of printing labels has been replaced with a simple, fast system.

This project has synergy with the Entrée project, which is making the contents of the Australian Plant DNA Bank at Southern Cross University, the N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium at the University of New England and the Janet Cosh Herbarium at the University of Wollongong available to the Atlas of Living Australia and Australia’s Virtual Herbarium.

The technology developed for the NCW Beadle Herbarium project provides a model for other herbaria wanting to solve similar problems.

Caretrack kicks off

Caretrack Australia is part of a National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC) funded program grant for improving the safety and aptness of healthcare. The aim is to study how and why common conditions are managed by healthcare providers. The project anticipates recruiting 1000 participants and reviewing all healthcare medical records for 26 clinical conditions; this involves 723 indicators and approximately 3000 healthcare providers.

Intersect will build an offline data collection system and central database with web applications for managing data collection about treatment received by patients with certain conditions. The project is a collaboration of Caretrack Australia, the University of South Australia and UNSW.

ANDS projects start

Intersect is undertaking a number of Australian National Data Service (ANDS) projects for the University of Sydney, UNSW and the University of Wollongong. These projects will become part of the ANDS ‘Seeding the Commons’ and ‘Data Capture’ programs. The first to kick off is the Biomechanics Data Capture project for the University of Wollongong. More details soon.

New eResearch Analyst for UWS

Peter Bugeia has joined Intersect as the eResearch Analyst for the University of Western Sydney. Peter has 27 years IT experience across a wide range of industries including medicine, banking and finance, and media.  He has worked in commercial, not-for-profit and public sectors and has held various roles from Senior Software Engineer and Test Manager to Project Manager, Enterprise Architect and Business Analyst.

Recruiting

We currently have vacancies for software engineers with strong Perl skills. For more information, see https://www.intersect.org.au/job-opportunities

Kind regards
Leonie Hellmers

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