Andrew Treloar describes how the Australian National Data Service are working with partners to ensure data is available and linked together to add value to research impact.

1. ANDS: increasing
connections to add value
Andrew Treloar, Director of Technology
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2. ANDS at a glance
 In operation since 2009
 40 staff (mostly Melbourne, Canberra)
 Funded as “the voice for data”
 Working to make Australia’s research data more
valuable
 Funding through to mid 2016 (mid 2017?)
CC-BY @atreloar 2

3. ANDS enables transformation of:
Data:
Unmanaged
Disconnected
Invisible
Single use
CC-BY @atreloar 3
to Structured Collections:
Managed
Connected
Findable
Reusable
so that Australian researchers can easily publish,
discover, access and use/re-use research data.

4. CC-BY @atreloar
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5. Why care about connections?
 Context
 Discovery
 Evidence for trustworthiness
 Credit
 Integrity of scholarly record
 Better basis for analysis
 Summary: greater value!
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6. Central role of identifiers
 Need to be able to identify the endpoint for a
connection
 ideally uniquely
 Some identifiers need to be managed globally, but
some can be managed locally
 NOTE: Identifiers do not necessarily need to
persist
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7. 5 things that need to persist for persistence
 the identifier- that is the token or string itself.
 the thing being pointed at by the identifier. For example,
the content.
 the mapping of the identifier to the thing being identified.
 the resolver that allows one to follow the mapping of the
identifier to the thing being identified.
 a mechanism for updating the mapping of the identifier to
the thing being identified.
 See http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-
doi-outage-followup-report.html for more on persistence
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8. 8
vs

9. Persistence vs. Coolness
 Persistent identifiers are often criticised in favour
of cool URIs
 http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
 Yes, it’s possible to be cool, but impossible to be
effortlessly cool
 Persistent identifier mechanisms are often a way
of engineering away brittleness in identifier
infrastructure
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10. A data-centric view of the space
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11. ResearcherLink
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 ANDS originally encouraged use of Trove/NLA ID
 ORCID now has market momentum behind it
 ANDS recently assisted with work towards decision
by ARC/NHMRC/UA/CAUL/ARMS to broadly
encourage use of ORCID
 doi:10.4225/14/552b16efae74b

12. PublicationLink
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 DataCite DOIs increasingly the way to link from
publications to data
 ANDS working with Thomson-Reuters Data
Citation Index to enable them to track citations to
data
 ANDS provides national harvest point through
Research Data Australia
 http://ands.org.au/cite-data/dci.html

13. GrantLink
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 ANDS working with ARC and NHMRC to provide
LOD URIs for research grants
 ARC: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0211416
 NHMRC: http://purl.org/au-
research/grants/nhmrc/1020281
 Overview: http://ands.org.au/guides/ardc-activity-
infrastructure.html
 API:
http://developers.ands.org.au/services/getgrants/

14. Research Data Switchboard
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 Collaborative project to enable cross-platform
discovery between research data services
 Created as part of Research Data Alliance DDRI-
WG
 Using network of AMS EC2 instances to automate
process
 Harvest from data providers, create graph
database, provide API to consumers of graph

15. Obligatory architecture diagram
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16. Some gratuitous eye-candy
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18. Project THOR
Technical and Human infrastructure for Open
Research
Builds on ODIN (ORCID-DataCite Interoperability
Network)
Establishing seamless integration between articles,
data, and researchers across the research lifecycle
Making persistent identifier use for people and
research artefacts the default
http://project-thor.eu

19. Project partners
Project Partners

20. Conclusion
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 ANDS cares about connections
 ANDS is working to develop and provide LOD-
compatible URIs as part of national infrastructure
 ANDS is continuing development on Research Data
Switchboard
 available for public use on September 23

21. Questions?
 ands.org.au
 http://ands.org.au/guides/data-connections.html
 http://rd-switchboard.org/
 andrew.treloar@ands.org.au
 @atreloar
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