Designing Adaptable Spatial Cyberinfrastructure for Urban eResearch

In this chapter, we present and discuss an adaptable cyberinfrastructure (e-Infrastructure) for urban research. We illustrate the benefits of a loosely coupled service-oriented architecture-based design pattern for the internal architecture of this e-Infrastructure. This is presented in the context of the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN), which provides an urban research environment across Australia supporting access to large amounts of highly distributed and heterogeneous data with accompanying analytical tools. The system is being reactively designed based on evolving and growing requirements from the community. We discuss the differences between more common spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) and eResearch infrastructures, and describe the unique AURIN environment set up to provide these additional features. The different aspects of loose coupling in internal architectures are examined in the context of the implemented components of the AURIN system. We conclude by discussing the benefits as well as challenges of this system architecture pattern for meeting the needs of urban researchers.