About BlueNet

The University of Tasmania was the lead institute of a consortium that was granted $3.5 million from the Australian Government to establish BlueNet - the Australian Marine Science Data Network. Funding for the project was provided through the Department of Education, Science and Training's (DEST's) Backing Australia's Ability program. The project aimed to provide a virtual data centre to support long term curation and management of data for Australia 's marine science researchers. BlueNet linked vast data repositories and marine resources that currently reside in academic and government institutions both in Australia and overseas. It is an extension of the nation's first on-line, virtual facility - the Australian Ocean Data Centre Joint Facility (AODCJF).

The BlueNet project established a national distributed marine science data network linking universities to the AODCJF, to support the long term data curation requirements, and data access needs of Australia’s marine science researchers.

BlueNet built infrastructure to enable the discovery, access and online integration of multi-disciplinary marine science data on a very large scale, to support current and future marine science and climate change research, ecosystem management and government decision making.

BlueNet provided the mechanisms by which universities can utilise and build on existing data archiving facilities available within the AODCJF institutions. The intention was to enable universities to both access, utilise and add to repositories of the AODCJF, creating a virtual national ocean data centre.

Using a service-oriented-architecture, and by leveraging existing informatics and distributed computing standards, BlueNet enabled the discovery, access and on-line integration of multi-disciplinary marine science data on a scale never attempted before. The BlueNet infrastructure will provide secure, long-term data archiving facilities, a platform for collaboratively using and sharing datasets and data-manipulation processes, the deployment of novel data exploitation tools as well as the governance and institutional arrangements, and proactive adoption of standards-based foci, necessary to maintain an ongoing, interoperable, accessible and flexible network.