Our Approach

ANDS' task is to create the infrastructure to enable Australian researchers to easily publish, discover, access and use research data.

Its approach is to engage in partnerships with the research institutions to enable better local data management that enables structured collections to be created and published. ANDS then connects those collections so that they can be found and used. These connected collections, together with the infrastructure form the Australian Research Data Commons.

These collections descriptions exploit the ISO 2146 standard, with the model that researchers need rich paths to data collections that might be important - discipline paths, institutional paths, ANDS published collections pages that can be found through international serch engines and other paths yet to be developed - the ARDC must be more than a catalogue - it has to be a rich mesh of description.

Australian Research Data Commons

ANDS conducts its activities through 7 inter-related programs:

Frameworks and Capabilities

The frameworks in which research data is created and used, and the capability of the research sector to manage research data is crucial. This program ensures that institutions have the capability and the research system have the structures in place to enable researchers to manage, publish, share and re‐use research data.

Seeding the Commons

This program is focused on ensuring that research institutions are supporting researchers to capture manage, publish and reuse thier research data. It has a particular focus on data that cannot be automatically captured at instrument.

It will ensure higher quality metadata (critical for re-use and discovery) can be produced consistently as simply as possible.

Data Capture Infrastructure

Existing data capture infrastructure commonly used by Australian researchers and research institutions must be adapted to ensure that the creation and capture phases of research are fully integrated for effective ingestion into the Research Data and Metadata Stores. This integration will make it easier for researchers to contribute data to the commons directly from the lab, instrument, field work site, etc. It will ensure higher quality metadata (critical for re-use and discovery) can be produced consistently when possible through automated systems.

Research Metadata Store Infrastructure

Metadata stores are needed at research producing institutions. Data and metadata capture infrastructure needs a combination of data stores provided through ARCS and metadata stores provided by ANDS to hold all relevant information. Researchers need to be able to automatically or by deliberate choice publish their data using this infrastructure combined with the national services.

Public Sector Data Program

Infrastructure is needed to make available feeds of data collection descriptions from a range of public sector agencies. These would include producers of research outputs such as the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and GeoScience Australia. It would also include owners of data gathering activities and collections that might be research inputs, such as Departments of Primary Industry, Museums, and Libraries.

Australian Research Data Commons Core Infrastructure

Infrastructure is needed to federate and make visible the Data Commons. This includes

• persistent identification of data collections,
• feeds from authoritative sources of information about people, organisations, research activities, funded programs,
• a collections registry to store the metadata harvested from data holders,
• discovery services to enable users of the Data Commons to find and access data holdings, and
• vocabulary services to ensure that the data is of high quality and thus the discovery services produce the most effective experience.

Australian Research Data Commons Applications Infrastructure

Infrastructure is needed to fully exploit the data held in the commons. This includes infrastructure to support:

• data integration, fusion, and merging,
• data visualisation, and
• data analysis.

The approach taken will be to work closely with leading research groups and Super Science initiatives on specific tools for the use and re-use of the newly created pool of data assets in the commons.