Location
Forney Hall (FRNY) G124
Session Number
Session 10
Start Date
23-6-2010 1:00 PM
End Date
23-6-2010 2:00 PM
Keywords
research data management, research data, research data registry, research information
Description
The University of Melbourne is one of the richest sources of research data in Australia making it a highly desirable contributor to Australia’s emerging Research Data Commons – an initiative of the nationally funded Australian Research Data Service (ANDS). This paper will outline how The University of Melbourne partnered with (ANDS) to test a framework for exposing a number of research data collections from a variety of research communities at the university. It will identify how the project evolved with multiple agendas including;
1) The need to enable university research data and records policy compliance.
2) Participation in the national research data commons, and
3) Creating virtual research profiles for cross organizational research themes, as a way of strengthening cross disciplinary research.
Underpinning these agendas is an approach to populating the research data registry based on the reuse of already collected data on research. In this project we considered it critical that processes used for collecting information about research datasets leverage existing information that the University already collects about research such as grants and publications. Using this information, we tested how readily we were also able to detect the existence of research data sets, along with the probable associated researchers, project description, departments, and research classifications before individual researchers were directly engaged. Such an approach required command of research administrative datasets collected by the University’s Research Office, but also the clever use of Library technologies to quickly source and scan publications for descriptions of research data. The result of these ‘linked data’ connections between research data sets and the rest of the research information framework was stored in an RDF triple store using an instance of the VITRO platform created by the University of Cornell. The paper will also cover the choice of VITRO as an appropriate platform to base a research data registry.
Creating a university research data registry: enabling compliance, and raising the profile of research data at the University of Melbourne
Forney Hall (FRNY) G124
The University of Melbourne is one of the richest sources of research data in Australia making it a highly desirable contributor to Australia’s emerging Research Data Commons – an initiative of the nationally funded Australian Research Data Service (ANDS). This paper will outline how The University of Melbourne partnered with (ANDS) to test a framework for exposing a number of research data collections from a variety of research communities at the university. It will identify how the project evolved with multiple agendas including;
1) The need to enable university research data and records policy compliance.
2) Participation in the national research data commons, and
3) Creating virtual research profiles for cross organizational research themes, as a way of strengthening cross disciplinary research.
Underpinning these agendas is an approach to populating the research data registry based on the reuse of already collected data on research. In this project we considered it critical that processes used for collecting information about research datasets leverage existing information that the University already collects about research such as grants and publications. Using this information, we tested how readily we were also able to detect the existence of research data sets, along with the probable associated researchers, project description, departments, and research classifications before individual researchers were directly engaged. Such an approach required command of research administrative datasets collected by the University’s Research Office, but also the clever use of Library technologies to quickly source and scan publications for descriptions of research data. The result of these ‘linked data’ connections between research data sets and the rest of the research information framework was stored in an RDF triple store using an instance of the VITRO platform created by the University of Cornell. The paper will also cover the choice of VITRO as an appropriate platform to base a research data registry.