Welcome to The Ark (formerly WAGER)

The Ark is a collaborative international project, based at the University of Western Australia, whose objective is to build high-quality open source software to support the medical research community. The Ark team currently collaborates with developers working on the OBiBa project and with developers at the Centre for Mega Epidemiology at Melbourne University. The Ark was originally established as a Core National Enabling Resource to develop infrastructure to facilitate the integration of existing and future disease-specific clinical, epidemiological and genetic resources with biospecimen banks and with linked health data.

The Ark suite of informatics applications now provide a solid foundation for the conduct of human medical research studies.  Our solutions integrate patient recruitment, data collection and data extraction for analysis functions whilst maintaining the highest levels of data security and integrity.

As a result of being initially funded through an NHMRC Enabling Grant and with ongoing funding from the University of Western Australia, The Ark has been able to develop its capabilities to the point where it is able to cost-effectively provide Australian researchers with access to a broad spectrum of informatics capabilities.

The Ark currently provides hosted access to these applications on infrastructure located within a secure facility at the University of Western Australia.  Significant work is currently underway to migrate all of the existing applications to an open source platform.   Upon completion of this redevelopment project research groups around Australia and internationally will have the option of downloading the software and running it locally or choosing to take advantage of The Ark's own hosting capability.  The Ark will provide a technical support service for those institutions or research groups that choose to run a local copy of the software.