The objective of the APO-led  ARC LIEF grant  Linked Semantic Platforms (LSP) for Social Infrastructure Project is to develop the next generation of decision-support tools for interdisciplinary research on critical public policy issues through linked open data, knowledge graphs and collaborations across existing research infrastructure projects.

The project expects to achieve significant benefits for evidence-based policy research by creating open linked databases and innovative analytical tools for the diverse data and documents available. This will support researchers in universities, industry, government, and NGOs to find new solutions to critical public policy issues in social care, public health, work and wellbeing, transport, built environments and digital inclusion.

Research team

The team of researchers and positions that have been filled are as follows:

Three streams of work

The project is broken into three streams of work as shown in this illustration:

Each stream will focus on aligning the work effort to achieve best outcome for the project.

Stream 1: Research collections

The research collections covered by this LIEF project are as follows:

Collection	Chief Investigator
Cultural Policy & Creative Industries	Susan Luckman
Family Violence	Jane Farmer
Digital Health Systems	Penelope Schofield & Ian Olver
Work, Learning and Wellbeing in the Digital Economy	Jane Farmer & Susan Luckman
Sustainable Urban Precincts	Peter Graham & Peter Newton
Open Knowledge	Kerry London
RMIT ABC Fact Check	Julian Thomas
Urban Planning	Jago Dodson

Stream 2: Understanding user needs

The research question for this needs analysis is to:

“… understand the information practices of end users, and their needs for public resources and tools in the emerging context of big data.”

HREC Application

We are currently conducting a series of focus groups to gather data on people’s information practices. We are inviting participants from Government, NGO, Industry and Academic sectors and covering the Collection topics listed above.

Stream 3: Building the tools

The aim of the LIEF project is to build research infrastructure tools to support the needs identified in Stream 2 for the research topics in Stream 1. These tools will cover the following areas relating to research infrastructure:

1. Semantic searching
2. Automated cataloging
3. Linked information
4. Intuitive visualisation

Semantic searching

Data scientist Jaewon Kim from RMIT University, along with APO Webmaster Camilo Jorquera, have investigated how users currently search using APO, as well as comparing APO’s search with Google search. 

Recommendations have been made for changes that will be implemented in the second year of the project.

Automated cataloging

The analysis from Swinburne University’s Yong-Bin Kang and APO Information Architect Les Kneebone has focused on how APO catalogues its content. Analysis of the subject and keyword terms has identified that there are opportunities for subject selection that will improve discoverability of the APO content.

Next up, they will focus on transitioning APO’s subject and keyword terms to a thesaurus-style taxonomy to enable an automatic cataloguing tool.

Linked information

The Australian National University (ANU)’s Australian Data Archive (ADA) team together with the APO team have investigated linking APO resources to their data set sources. In addition, APO has also investigated the use of ResearchGraph to augment the APO data, using ORCID, RAiD, and DOI identifiers to link to other databases.

Further inter-operability with Informit and Google Scholar has also been achieved, with plans to complete linking to data sets, including AURIN, early next year.

Intuitive visualisations

The preparation for the data visualisations with University of South Australia (UniSA) was completed this year. The second year will look to implement this pilot data visualisation of UniSA’s data sets.

In addition, the needs analysis results will inform the implementation of improved visualisation of resource quality assessment and linked information.

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Showcasing impact

Various project team members have already given presentations on our work in 2018, including at the Digital Humanities conference in Adelaide in September, at the eResearch Australasia conference in Melbourne in October, and at Swinburne University’s Social Innovation Research Institute’s Society 4.0 Forum in November.

We will keep you updated on future events where project participants will showcase our findings and impact.