PL059 - Scientific workflow system for environmental health impact assessments

Research Investment

Researchers: Mr Ivan Charles Hanigan (Principal investigator)

Brief description Health impact assessments of environmental exposures are currently hampered by the absence of integrated datasets, workflows and metadata/provenance requirements. The Scientific workflow system for environmental health impact assessments (Air-Health) project will solve the difficulties associated with merging environmental and health datasets using existing computational and data infrastructure in such a way that no technical skills in database systems, network-based remote access or coding will be required by users.

The Air-Health project will develop a scientific workflow system for health impact assessments of air pollution that will enable users to build and extend analyses by linking data acquisition, data transformation, mathematical operations, graphing, statistical analysis and outputs. The tools will streamline desktop and web-based research processes and will be built on open software and cloud services, such as the Apache workflow system Airflow, Collaborative Environment for Scholarly Research and Analysis and AARNet Cloudstor infrastructure.

The platform will use existing application programming interfaces to access environmental and health data from several sources, including state government air pollution monitors, satellites from space agencies, the Bureau of Meteorology, land use/planning agencies, Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Transport Research Cloud. Initially, (1) these data will be standardised and (2) an air quality workbench will be constructed with fully redeployable docker containers for all the data inputs required for air pollution modelling. We will then (3) design an interface on which air pollution modelling can be performed and corresponding health impacts can be determined for pollutants and populations of interest.

Amount 163,459.00 AUD

Scheme Platforms Program