The name “Alveo” is derived from the Latin noun “Alveus” which is one of the Latin words for “beehive” (Latin synonyms are “alvārium”, “alveārium”, “alvus” some of which strangely also have the meaning of “river bed”). “Alveo” is both the Dative and Ablative cases of this noun. This continues the tradition of naming projects which have been funded by NeCTAR with words which loosely relate to bees and honey.
Alveo is a web-based data discovery application for examining collections of human communication data. It can be accessed using any web browser.
Alveo requires users to have an Alveo account and password registered for their email address. This account can be requested from the Alveo Login screen. See Accessing Alveo.
Alveo follows the same conventions that are used by almost any web application.
The Alveo Data Collections are aggregated from other sources and are configured for quick searching. In particular, Alveo permits searching on the content of these data sets. See Alveo Data Structures for information on the way Alveo data is structured.
There are Data Collection Licensing Requirements for all the Collections of data that Alveo gives access to. Therefore, you must read and understand the licence conditions for using each Collection and then agree to those conditions before you will be given access. See Accepting Licences to Access Collections.
To access AusTalk in Alveo, see the help page Accessing AusTalk in Alveo.
Using Alveo Help
Whenever a page from this Help is displayed (including this one), a list of Help Pages is also displayed in the right side-bar of the screen. Click on the page titles in this List to navigate directly around the Help.
This Help is intended for reference while you are using Alveo. Therefore, it doesn’t attempt to explain all of Alveo’s buttons, questions and fields. Instead, it explains Alveo’s higher level concepts that are not immediately evident from the screens and dialogs. The components it does not explain follow the usual operating conventions of web-based applications.
Alveo and Galaxy
The Galaxy workflow engine, that was developed for bioinformatics research, has been adapted so that it is useful for working with human communication data and integrated into Alveo. You can access this integrated Galaxy directly from the Alveo menus. It is able to read data files directly from Alveo.
This Help gives only very brief information about Galaxy / Aveo.
- For information on how to get a Galaxy / Alveo account see Accessing Galaxy on Alveo.
- For information about basic Galaxy / Alveo operation, how to access the Galaxy Help pages, how to access the Galaxy Project “Learn” pages and the special Galaxy functions which work with Alveo see Transferring Data to Galaxy for Processing and Accessing the Galaxy Help.
Alveo and Emu/R
The R Project for Statistical Computing provides a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. To learn more about the R Project and the R environment, go to the R Project’s web site.
EMU is a collection of software tools for the creation, manipulation and analysis of speech databases. EMU runs in the R environment, and requires that R is installed on your computer. EMU/R is an open source project hosted here on the SourceForge platform.
Alveo does not use EMU. However, the Alveo R Library is a library of R functions which can download Alveo data from the Alveo server into the EMU database format on your local computer. The Alveo R Library is available for download and can be used with EMU to extract data from Alveo so that those data can be processed using EMU and the R environment.
See Using Alveo Data with EMU/R for information on how to set up EMU/R to work with Alveo and how to transfer Alveo data to EMU.