ARDC Activity Infrastructure
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Who should read this?
This document is intended for potential contributors to Research Data Australia. It is a general introduction to the Australian Research Data Commons Activity Infrastructure, a proposed web-service-enabled register of Australian research projects, established in collaboration with funding agencies.
Why do we need infrastructure for Research Activity?
The ANDS Data Connections Strategy aims to enable the linking of datasets in the Australian Research Data Commons via common entities and concepts. The result is a richer interconnected mesh of information about data collections, services, researchers and research projects.
One of these common entities is information about funded research projects, which provides valuable context for research datasets and publications in the commons, and for descriptions of activities and research data collections in Research Data Australia.
Research funding organisations hold good quality public information about funded research projects. The goal is to publish this information in a structured format, accessible by machines as well as humans.
This will support lookup services that can access this single authoritative source of standardised names, descriptions and persistent identifiers for funded research projects. Use of this information will ensure that research projects and their outputs can be linked consistently.
What are the benefits?
The Australian Research Data Commons Activity Infrastructure will benefit researchers and innovators by making it easier to access and provide definitive contextual information and identifiers for research projects related to datasets.
The potential users of the data will be the ultimate beneficiaries; if datasets are associated with better contextual information about their originating research project, it will be easier to find relevant data and make a judgment about its value.
This infrastructure and the standardisation of information about research projects and grants will also have significant potential benefits for areas beyond the Australian Research Data Commons, such as research impact assessment, collaborative research projects, and activity based reporting.
How will it work?
The Activity Infrastructure will provide an automated process to access the definitive public information about a funded research project that is already held by the funding agencies and research organisations.
ANDS will partner with funding agencies to assist them develop infrastructure to operate a public information service about research grants that will support machine access using standard protocols and data models for describing research projects. The infrastructure will also support an online discovery service and persistent, unique, citable identifiers for each research grant.
ANDS will partner with research institutions to develop the local infrastructure to access this definitive source information, integrate it into their information systems and assist the development of interfaces for research and management software tools to take advantage of this information in the natural workflow of researchers and research support staff.
What is required of a contributor?
Once the infrastructure is in place, contributors to the ANDS Registry will be encouraged to modify their internal systems to access the infrastructure and store the persistent identifiers for research grants in their systems.
Two scenarios are likely.
Scenario 1:
A contributor plans to export data about their research projects from their own Research Management System and include them as activity records in their feeds to the ANDS Registry. If the project is funded by a grant that is recorded in the Activity Infrastructure, then the persistent identifier for the grant should be included in an identifier element of the project description.
Activity record example:
<identifier type="purl">http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0450786</identifier>
Scenario 2:
A contributor is not providing their own activity records for research projects. In these cases, the contributor would include a link to the related research project in their data collection description record. This is done by creating a relation to the registry object which describes the research grant. These descriptions are harvested from the funding bodies and the record key can be obtained via a lookup service provided by the ANDS registry.
Collection record example:
<relatedObject>
<key>http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0450786</key>
<relation type="isOutputOf"/>
</relatedObject>
In both scenarios, connections can be made in Research Data Australia between the original project description and subsequent information about the research project and the research data collections produced by that project.
When will the Activity Infrastructure be in place?
Phase 1 of this project will see ANDS publish public information about research grants on behalf of the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). During this phase, the usual ANDS Web Services can be used by other systems to access this information programmatically from the ANDS Registry.
A persistent identifier will be minted for each research grant awarded by the ARC and NHMRC. Initially this will resolve to the view page for the research grant in Research Data Australia.
Phase 2 of this project will see the funding bodies take over the publishing of information about their research grants and data will be able to be retrieved programmatically in standard formats such as the VIVO Ontology for research information. The same persistent identifier will continue as the reference for the research grant, but will resolve to the relevant funding body’s service, not Research Data Australia.
Further Information
The ANDS Data Connections Strategy: http://ands.org.au/guides/data-connections.html
