About Fieldmark
Fieldmark® is made by Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd, an Australian company registered in New South Wales. The software has been in development, under several names, since 2012, and deployed in the field since 2014.
Where it came from
2012. The work starts as the FAIMS project, a university-based research infrastructure project hosted by UNSW Sydney. The project launched under a grant from the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) programme, beginning with a workshop in Sydney attended by over 80 archaeologists and technologists. From the start, the goal of the project was to build field data capture for the conditions researchers actually worked in: no network, challenging environments, and protocols that no generic form app could express.
2012 to 2014. FAIMS Mobile v1.x is built using the grant from NeCTAR and sees its first deployments. The team published an initial presentation of the project in Australian Archaeology.
2014 to 2020. Based on feedback from early deployment, the team begins development of FAIMS Mobile v2.x, funded by the Australian Research Council, the NSW Department of Industry, CSIRO under its ON technology innovation programme, and internal infrastructure schemes at UNSW and Macquarie University. In 2015 the project moved from UNSW to Macquarie. As interest in FAIMS extended beyond archaeology, the project took its present name, the Field Acquired Information Management Systems. FAIMS Mobile runs in the field. During the 2.x era, FAIMS was customised for about 70 workflows on more than 40 projects, in disciplines including environmental geochemistry, avian ecology, linguistics, and oral history. Several of these use cases are presented in our publications.
2020 to 2023. The FAIMS3 rebuild begins, co-funded by the Australian Research Data Commons, led by Macquarie University with CSIRO, Aarhus University, UNSW, AARNet, and La Trobe University as partners: https://ardc.edu.au/project/faims-3-0/. It is a ground-up rebuild of FAIMS 2.x built to carry the older capability forward and extend it in a modern stack, not just a version bump. Commercialisation of the underlying open-source software was part of this phase of the project. In May 2020 Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd is registered, a spin-out from Macquarie University founded by researchers who had worked on the project since 2012, joined by a Computer Scientist new to the project. In December 2022, Fieldmark launches, built on FAIMS3, with a hosted service following in 2023.
2024 onward. CSIRO builds its Disaster Assessment Surveyor System on FAIMS3, and in 2026 Bolgiaten commissions GroundSight. Fieldmark sees its first enterprise deployments at Australian universities.
FAIMS / Fieldmark builders and users documented their learnings from the earliest FAIMS deployments to current work in various publications.
-
2012
The FAIMS project begins at UNSW Sydney, funded by NeCTAR.
-
2014
FAIMS Mobile is deployed in the field for the first time.
-
2015
The project moves to Macquarie University. FAIMS Mobile 2 goes on to serve about 70 workflows on more than 40 projects.
-
2020
The FAIMS3 rebuild begins, co-funded by the Australian Research Data Commons. Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd is registered.
-
2022
Fieldmark launches in December, built on FAIMS3, with the hosted service following in 2023.
-
2024 onward
CSIRO and Bolgiaten build products on FAIMS3. Fieldmark sees its first enterprise deployments at Australian universities.
Developers and partners
Fieldmark is built and supported by a small, established Australian team with years of continuity extending back to FAIMS development as a research project. The people who sell and support Fieldmark are the same people who build and run (and in three cases use) the service.
FAIMS3, the platform Fieldmark is built on, is open source, and other organisations contribute significantly to the codebase. For example, in close collaboration with the team at Fieldmark, CSIRO contributed major components to the open-source codebase and provides significant design and engineering input to platform development. A notable contribution is CSIRO’s development of the platform’s automated deployment for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This collaborative approach enhances the capability and sustainability of the software.
We work with Research Space on electronic laboratory notebook integration, aiming to provide an integrated research notebook solution. Current integration includes a handover of physical sample metadata between the two systems, and we want to hear from users which workflows should be developed next.
Others build products of their own on the platform. CSIRO has built a national system for multi-hazard post-disaster impact assessment, developed largely by its own engineers. See the case study.
Bolgiaten Limited has commissioned our team to build GroundSight, a system for engineering inspection and materials testing. See custom applications.
The Australian Research Data Commons describes Fieldmark and the digitisation bottleneck it was built to remove.
What our customers do with it is on case studies.
The corporate side
Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd (EFN) exists to commercialise Fieldmark: to run it, support it, and keep developing it on revenue rather than on grant cycles. EFN is committed to open-source development of the core product.
Company information, news, and the people behind Fieldmark can be found at
https://fieldnote.au. Fieldmark is the product.
Electronic Field Notebooks (fieldnote.au) is the company.
Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd | ABN 15 640 693 287
Level 1/457-459 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010 | W www.fieldnote.au