What is eResearch?

The term ‘eResearch’ encapsulates research activities that use a spectrum of advanced ICT capabilities and embraces new research methodologies emerging from increasing access to:

Broadband communications networks, research instruments and facilities, sensor networks, data repositories and their associated data standards, management and curation tools, and high performance computing resources
Software and infrastructure services that enable secure connectivity and interoperability between researchers and the wide variety of data repositories, computers, systems and networks on which they depend;
Application and discipline-specific tools such as graphics intensive visualisation and simulation software, and interaction tools that provide the human interface allowing researchers to interact with each other and with their instruments, computational tools and data resources.

eResearch capabilities serve to advance and augment, rather than replace traditional research methodologies, but there is a growing dependence on the following e-Research capabilities to:

discover knowledge, whether held in digital or physical forms;
access data as well as the software tools that are being made available to manipulate or analyse this data;
synthesise, curate and disseminate new knowledge efficiently;
facilitate interactivity and research collaboration, allowing researchers to work seamlessly from desk-to-desk within and between organisations.¹

While none of these capabilities are new, over recent years their use has been increasing, particularly in computational science, and spreading into the humanities and social science. International collaborations are common and eResearch-powered research is tackling an impressive range of problems which would have been impossible without it. The majority of research in the future will embody capabilities which we consider e-Research today.

Researchers and research organisations in Europe and North America have pioneered much of the early work on eResearch and they have developed relatively sophisticated structures to encourage and develop the use of eResearch^2,3,4. Australia is in the process of creating its own structures now.

Other e-Research Centres analogous to INTERSECT:

1 Dr Mike Sargent AM, Final Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee: An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework, April 2006

2 http://www.nesc.ac.uk/centres/

3 http://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=OCI

4 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/default.htm