Activity
Meaning and purpose
An activity is an undertaking or process related to the creation, update, or maintenance of a collection.
- It is something that people do, rather than a concrete thing.
- It has a beginning and (at least potentially) an end.
- It is something that researchers participate in.
- It can be something funded by an agency.
- It has research outputs, which can include publications, and collections (collections, including datasets, are of direct interest to ANDS).
Activity records usually describe a project—a piece of work that creates research data. Activity records may also include grant descriptions or proposals.
Activity records are gathered to provide context for collections. Context helps collection discovery in two main ways:
- The activity description should include the research question that the research is trying to solve. By linking this to the collection, users can understand why the collection was gathered, and what issues it addresses. The activity description can also present the methodology used to gather the collection.
- If multiple collections are outputs of the same research activity, then they are closely related (they are produced to answer the same research question). This connection can be used to improve discovery of the related collections.
Activity types
The kind of activity (activity type) is described by choosing from the following:
project
A piece of work that is undertaken or attempted, with a start and end date and defined objectives e.g. a three-year study on applied mathematics, a grant-funded project with a particular goal.
Projects include:
NHMRC
- Research Support projects
ARC
- Discovery Projects
- Linkage International Projects
- Discovery Indigenous Researchers Development Projects
- e-Research projects
- Linkage Projects
- Linkage–Special Research Inititatives projects
- Linkage Learned Academies Special Projects
program
A system of activities intended to meet a public need e.g. Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs). A program is an ongoing body of work on a research topic, set up as an organisation with designated infrastructure. Programs address much broader research questions than projects, which are more narrowly focussed. Programs should be used instead of projects when the collection does not naturally fall under a project. Although programs can undertake projects, there is no need to align projects to programs in Research Data Australia, since activity-to-activity relations are not a priority.
Programs include:
NHMRC
- Infrastructure Support programs
ARC
- ARC Centres of Excellence
- Co-funded Centres of Excellence
- Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities programs
- ARC Research Networks
course
Education imparted in a series of lessons or meetings e.g. PhD or Honours university course. Coursework can produce research collections (e.g. essays, projects within the course); but the major class of course expected in Research Data Australia are theses. There is a distinction that needs to be made between each of:
- The activity of the thesis—the candidature, something with a beginning year and an end year, something which the candidate does to answer a research question
- The collections output from the thesis—the data that the candidate has gathered in the course of their candidature in order to answer the research question
- The document output from the thesis—the PDF or printed thesis, whether published in book form, or stored in an institutional repository or university library ANDS expects a record for both the activity and its output (the collection). The document (thesis) would be attached to the collection description and/or the activity, as RelatedInfo.
award
Something given to recognise excellence in a certain field e.g. Nobel prize.
event
Something that happens at a particular place or time as an organised activity with participants or an audience e.g. a workshop, symposium, hackfest.
Activities, projects and grants
There is a conceptual distinction between grants and projects. A project is what the researcher actually does. A grant is the financial support that a funder offers the researcher to do the project; the grant description captures what the funder thinks the researcher will do in the project, although what ends up happening in the project may be somewhat different.
Grants are well-described because the process of grant administration gathers metadata about them. The projects that researchers actually carry out are not administered separately from grants, and they are documented in reports (to the funder or to university administration) and also in project outputs, which are less easy to translate into activity records. While the grant and the project are not necessarily the same thing, they are usually close enough that the grant description can be used as a starting point for the activity description.
ANDS will be obtaining grant descriptions from funding agencies to seed Research Data Australia. If ANDS partners want to describe a project more comprehensively, or give more up-to-date information, they should contribute their own activity record including the identifier for the grant that funded the project (see Step 10).
Date modified
The date metadata describing an activity was last changed in the source system can be recorded. See Date modified for more information.
Creating an Activity record: Best practice guidelines
The purpose of an activity record in Research Data Australia is to enable discovery of research data collections, and to provide context to a linked research data collection. That purpose informs many of the decisions to take below.
Step 1: Should I create an activity record at all?
Create an activity record relating to a collection, if it can provide meaningful context to a collection. More information
Projects can always provide meaningful context as activity records: they are well-documented (because of funder requirements), with named investigators, a budget, and abstracts. But not all collections are gathered through easily-described activities. In the following cases, the activities are so hard to describe, or provide so little benefit for discovery, that there is no point in creating descriptions:
- Collecting agencies (museums, archives, libraries) gather collections through their ongoing "business as usual" activities. Any record describing a "business as usual" activity would be trivial. The activity of the Fred Nurk Archive is "Gathering stuff about Fred Nurk"; that doesn't tell you anything you couldn't find out from the party record of the Fred Nurk Archive.
- Australian government and state government agencies also gather data as part of their "business as usual" activities, and these activities may be difficult to define in relation to specific collections. Such agencies may have a research focus (e.g. Australian Bureau of Statistics, CSIRO or Geoscience Australia) or a policy or administrative focus, but may still have data of interest for research purposes.
- Collections produced outside an academic context (such as journals and logbooks) will not have well-defined activities.
- Very old research collections may not have documentation available on the activities that produced them.
Step 2: Is my activity already described?
Your activity may already be described in Research Data Australia. If you are collaborating on a project with other institutions, someone from the other institution may have already created an activity record for your project. If your project was funded by the ARC or NHMRC, the ARDC Activity Infrastructure is populating Research Data Australia with project records from these funders.
Check in Research Data Australia to see if your activity is already described, before adding a new activity record:
- Search for matching records from other partners in Research Data Australia (production).
- Search for matching records from the ARC under the data source "Australian Research Council". Research Data Australia contains descriptions for ARC grants from 2001 to 2010 (later data is in the process of being acquired).
- Search for matching records from the NHMRC under the data source "National Health and Medical Research Council". Research Data Australia will contain records for NHMRC grants from 1985 to 2010 (later data is in the process of being acquired).
In the future, ANDS will be engaging with the ARC and NHMRC to provide Linked Data infrastructure for research projects; you will be able to do machine-to-machine and web search for project records, and get syndication of project descriptions and associated researchers.
If a record is already available for your activity, create your own activity record only if you wish to add value to what is already there. (For example: a more comprehensive description, a more up-to-date description, a description better reflecting your institution's concerns.) You cannot edit other partners' records, including the NHMRC and ARC records. If the existing record doesn't say enough about your project, you will need to give your own description of the project, in a separate activity record. See Identifiers for how to make sure the records are treated as describing the same project.
If an existing activity record is adequate for your needs, then you do not need to create a new record. To refer to the existing activity record from your party, service and collection records, use the key of the existing activity record to create a link to the activity through Related Object.
Example of linking from a collection record to an activity using activity identifier:
<!--XML document header-->
<collection type="dataset">
<!--other collection elements-->
<relatedObject>
<key>http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0799026</key>
<relation type="isOutputOf">
</relation>
</relatedObject>
<!--Link from collection to related activity using activity identifier-->
<!--remainder of collection record-->
</collection>
</registryObject>
</registryObjects>
Most partners will need to contribute some activity records as the ARC and NHMRC are not the only funders of research activity.
Step 3: Provide values for the various elements of the activity record.
For elements common to other object classes, refer to the definitions of those fields; in the following, we go through issues that are specific to activities.
Step 4: Type
See Activity Types for the distinction between the various types of activity.
Step 5: Key
Follow the Content Providers Guide on keys.
Do not use the NHMRC or ARC identifiers as keys for your own activity records: keys of the form http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/... and http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/... are reserved for records from those bodies.
Step 6: Name
Try to give your activity a name that is distinct from related groups or collections. If the collection and activity have the same name, you can suffix "project" to the activity name, or "dataset" or "collection" to the collection name. The activity name is usually already registered with a funder and in the institution's research office, so it is preferable to change the collection name.
Step 7: Location
For an activity, relevant locations may include a physical address or an electronic address. An appropriate electronic address for an activity is a URL to the project web page(s). If a research program has an office, a physical address might also be appropriate.
Step 8: Coverage
Temporal coverage refers to the intellectual content of an activity; for example, a project about the First World War has the temporal coverage 1914–1918. Do not use temporal coverage to provide start and finish dates of projects; a project about the First World War should not have a temporal coverage of 2007–2009.
(A new existenceDates element has been approved for addition to the RIF-CS schema to address project start and end dates; in the meantime, this information can be recorded in a description element of type="note".)
Step 9: Description
The description of projects is typically taken from the abstract sent to the funder in the grant application. However, grants and projects are not necessarily the same thing—the grant abstract describes what you intend to do, the project abstract describes what you have ended up doing. More background on grants and activities You may choose to adjust the wording of the activity description to reflect this difference.
Description types "brief" and "full" give summaries of the activity. If you want to provide other information about the activity, such as funding details, give it in a description of type "note". Example
Step 10: Identifier
If there is a public identifier for either the activity or the associated grant, ANDS strongly recommends providing that identifier as an activity identifier. We recommend this both for new records, and for existing records.
Persistent identifiers (in the form of PURLs) have been minted for each ARC and NHMRC research grant, and will always resolve to public information about that research grant. You can look these identifiers up in Research Data Australia. Please use these identifiers if a research project is funded by ARC or NHMRC.
These PURLs resolve to the corresponding project records in Research Data Australia. They will be persisted through any changes to the ARDC Activity Infrastructure, including any future search and syndication services provided directly by the ARC and NHMRC. The identifiers (in a non-PURL format) for ARC and NHMRC projects should also be on file in your research office.
Examples:
Australian Research Council identifier example:
<identifier type="purl">http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0559024</identifier>
NHMRC identifier example:
<identifier type="purl">http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/100009</identifier>
Some legacy records may show ARC and NHMRC identifiers as strings (e.g. <identifier type="arc">DP0559024</identifier>, <identifier type="nhmrc">100009</identifier>) but this form is not preferred.
ANDS will treat multiple records as describing the same activity, as long as they have the same authoritative identifier in their identifier field. For now, that means that the records must share the same ARC or NHMRC PURL. It will be sufficient for you to insert the ARC or NHMRC PURL in the identifier field of your activity record.
ANDS will not merge records describing the same activity into the one record. Instead it will co-locate records from different sources, concatenating them in the same display in Research Data Australia. The NHMRC or ARC record from the activity will appear first, as the authoritative activity record.
If your activity record overlaps with one from another partner, and both records have the same ARC or NHMRC identifiers, they will be treated as referring to the same activity. If the other partner's record does not have a common identifier, it will not be co-located with yours.
If there is no common public identifier that can be used to bring activity records from different sources together, partners should negotiate with each other to agree on who should provide a single comprehensive record, or if possible work with the project funder to develop a common public identifier.
Step 11 : Subjects
Provide a subject to allow Research Data Australia to associate an activity with a research field, and indirectly with other collections in the same field. ARC and NHMRC activity records already contain ANZSRC-FOR (Field of Research) subject codes.
Step 12 : Related objects
Bidirectional links
ANDS infers and displays bi-directional links between related objects in Research Data Australia. If a collection links to an activity within the same data source, the activity record does not need to link back out to the collection; ANDS will display the inferred reverse link in Research Data Australia. If the activity and collection are from different data sources, ANDS will only display the inferred reverse link if the receiving partner has opted in to allow bi-directional links.
ARC and NHMRC activity records have enabled reverse links. If your records link to an ARC or NHMRC activity record, a link back to your record will be visible from the ARC or NHMRC record in Research Data Australia.
For manually supplied records, ANDS requires partners to provide links in both directions, to familiarise them with the link structures involved.
Related Collections
Activities must be linked to a collection, through "hasOutput". By default, collections must link to activities, through "isOutputOf" —unless it does not make sense to provide an activity record. Should I create an activity record at all?
Related Parties
Activities must be linked to a party. This is to allow networks of researchers and collections to be clustered around research activities (through the "hasParticipant" relationship). This also makes it possible for users to get in touch with at least one party involved in the activity, as a contact point (through the "isManagedBy" relationship).
Research Data Australia is a collections registry: relations between activities and parties are only relevant if they improve collections discovery. For that reason, the other possible activity—party relations, "isFundedBy", "isOwnedBy" and "hasAssociationWith", should only be included if they improve the discoverability of collections. If you wish to include details of the funding relationship between an activity and a party, include this information in the activity's description (note) element.
Related Activities
Research Data Australia is a collections registry: accordingly, relations between activities (such as "isPartOf", "hasPart" or "isFundedBy") are only relevant if they improve collections discovery.
Partners can still describe umbrella projects using "hasPart", if that will present a more coherent view of the research question and approach than do the component projects ("isPartOf").
For activities, relations of type "hasPart" and "isPartOf" should only be established between activities of the same type, that is, between two programs, or between two projects. Relations between different types of activities need a more specific relation. For example, a program may fund a project, and this should be described using a "Funds"/"isFundedBy" relation.
If both an umbrella and a component project are described, ANDS prefers the collection to be described as the output of the component project, rather than the umbrella project. This is consistent with ANDS' approach to granularity for services and institutions.
Related Services
No relations are currently modelled between services and activities. The existing relations "isOutputOf" and "isFundedBy" between activities and collections could be extended to services, but this is beyond the requirements of Research Data Australia.
Step 13: Existence dates
From RIF-CS v1.3.0, start and/or finish dates for projects and other activities can be provided using the existenceDates element. Inclusion of this information will support later time-line searching or filtered searches e.g. find only completed projects.
RIF-CS Examples
Activity record
<activity type="program" dateModified="2009-03-16T22:55:00Z
<!--remainder of record-->
</activity>
Activity record with grant identifier and related objects (fictional example)
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<registryObjects xmlns="http://ands.org.au/standards/rif-cs/registryObjects" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://ands.org.au/standards/rif-cs/registryObjects http://services.ands.org.au/documentation/rifcs/schema/registryObjects.xsd">
<registryObject group="Example Group">
<key>exampleuni.edu.au/123245</key>
<originatingSource>example.edu.au</originatingSource>
<activity type="project">
<identifier type="purl">http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0799026</identifier>
<!--persistent identifier (purl) for grant included to allow matching of this activity record with other activity records on the same project-->
<name type="primary">
<namePart>Pathways to wellbeing for young adult males</namePart>
</name>
<relatedObject>
<key>993ca25edee0</key>
<relation type="hasOutput">
</relation>
</relatedObject>
<!--Link to related collection or dataset that is an output of this project-->
<relatedObject>
<key>35296</key>
<relation type="isManagedBy">
</relation>
</relatedObject>
<!--Link to related party that manages this project-->
<subject type="anzsrc-for" xml:lang="en">1103</subject>
<subject type="anzsrc-for" xml:lang="en">1117</subject>
<!--ANZSRC Field of Research codes for project-->
<description type="brief">In Australia, suicide accounts for over 20% of all causes of death in young adult males, and 25 to 44 year-old males have the highest suicide rates, ahead of death by motor vehicle accidents. This project will explore preventative approaches.
</description>
<!--Description of purpose and scope of project-->
<description type="note">Project Type: Grant
Initial Year: 2008
Duration: 3 years
Project Status: Proceeding
Funding Sponsor: ARC Discovery Projects (including Fellowship)
</description>
<!--Repeated description element to record grant details. This should not be needed for ARC or NHMRC funded grants once Research Activity Information Infrastructure is in place-->
</activity>
</registryObject>
</registryObjects>
| Date | Change history |
| April 2010 | Consultation draft |
| 26 Oct 2010 | Added advice for dealing with activities associated with multiple parties |
| 31 March 2011 | Added XML example and link to ARDC Activity Infrastructure Guide |
| 4 July 2011 | Expanded definitions and best practice guidelines |
| 21 July 2011 | Added information about NHMRC activity records being copied into production with linked records (interim functionality) |
| 2 Sept 2011 | Updated to reflect publishing of ARC and NHMRC activity records into Research Data Australia from late September 2011 |
| 21 Nov 2011 | Added link to new RIF-CS v1.3.0 existence dates element |
| 17 Apr 2012 | Updated information about ARC and NHMRC record currency in Research Data Australia; deleted obsolete advice about use of Sandbox |
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