By Tim Davies

Ever since the ceremonial turning of the sod, the SMART Infrastructure Facility has had its sights firmly fixed on establishing a National Infrastructure Data Centre. Policies were created, a framework was established and procedures with colourful flowcharts were produced. These tools were all well and good; however the vision of the National Infrastructure Data Centre was never going to be realised while all the data SMART had collected and produced remained hidden within the depths of its shared drives and databases; hidden in such a way that not even the SMART academics themselves knew the full extent of the SMART data collection.

SMART Metadata Homepage

The SMART metadata system’s overdue arrival ushers in a new age of data management at SMART as now we can show the world the extent of the facility’s data assets, whilst maintaining the integrity of data licence obligations to data providers.

Harnessing the power of GeoNetwork, SMART’s metadata system offers all the functionality of the standard install, plus features unique to SMART. These features include automatically harvesting metadata from SMART projects, and automatically harvesting metadata from the SMART shared drives.

The SMART metadata system offers visibility to SMART data where there was none. It provides an easy to use web interface with fine grained access control to keep our data as secure as our licences require us to.

For more information please contact the SMART Data Management team at smart-data@uow.edu.au.

Tim Davies is SMART Infrastructure Facility’s E-Research Co-Ordinator. He recently presented a talk on the SMART Metadata System, as part of the SMART Seminar Series.