About

About The Ark

The Ark Portal is a set of web-based applications that allow researchers to manage current studies and to analyse data selected from the range of The Ark collections.

The Ark has been developed by professional software developers working closely with a talented team of researchers, clinicians, mathematicians and statisticians within the Western Australian Centre for Genetic Epidemiology and Biostatistics. With more than 25 population-based Australian research projects currently relying on The Ark for study support and analysis capabilities, the system has been proven to meet the needs of the research community.

One of The Ark’s objectives is to provide a set of tools to the Australian medical research community that simplify and reduce the workload associated with study conduct while improving the quality and accessibility of the data collected. By leveraging the core The Ark computing infrastructure we are also able to provide secure, robust long-term data storage and to provide secure access to the data from a web browser.

Projects hosted by The Ark have realised significant benefits in time and cost. With the systems required to store and manage clinical, questionnaire, biochemical and genotypic data already in place, researchers no longer need to expend resources to develop their own solutions.

Access to The Ark Portal is granted for two primary purposes:

Study Support - Study management and LIMS applications are available to support the conduct of studies; and
Data Extraction - Tools are provided to support the extraction of data stored within The Ark collections for further analysis.

The Ark applications utilise a secure web-based front-end for access to The Ark data repositories. The use of server/client digital certificates and user authentication/authorisation ensures data can only be accessed and managed from authorised computers. End-to-end data encryption ensures traffic traversing the internet will never travel in the clear. Single sign-on is incorporated into The Ark Portal so users can access all of the applications and data for which they have permissions from a single site.