The Australian AuScope Virtual Research Environments (AVRE): a Flexible, Service-Oriented Geoscience Platform to Empower Researchers for the Global Challenges of Today and Those of the Future

AuScope is Australia’s National Geoscience Research Infrastructure Program and seeks to provide a world-class research physical and digital infrastructure to help tackle Australia's key geoscience challenges. Launched in 2007, AuScope’s data-generating infrastructures range from VLBI telescopes to geochemistry/geochronology laboratories and geophysical data acquisitions. To utilise data collected by these infrastructures and equivalents elsewhere, the Australian Geoscience Research and Government communities have collaborated on building a suite of data portals, tools, software and virtual laboratories that enabled discovery of data and tools and process them using online workflows. Over time, it was recognised the nature of research was changing - it has become more transdisciplinary and data-intensive. Processing and storage capacities have multiplied enabling processing of higher resolution datasets, new tools like notebooks and containerisation have become available, and the demand for mobile solutions is growing. Online portals with prefixed workflows no longer supported research innovation: researchers wanted greater flexibility to discover their own data sources and combine them with tools of their choice and process where most optimal. In 2017, the AuScope Virtual Research Environment (AVRE) was launched to support these new ambitions. The aspiration was to realise a service-oriented science platform that will allow users to choose their own data sets and tools and empower next generation data assimilation and modelling. Through using international standards and protocols, AVRE will ensure connection with equivalent infrastructures in the marine, bio, environmental, geospatial, etc communities, as well as seamlessly integrate with relevant international research infrastructures such as ENVRI, EPOS, EarthScope, etc.