Access to more than 20 years of bushfire and natural hazards data is now a step closer for Australian and international researchers through the development of a proof of concept for an innovative research data catalogue.
The establishment of a data catalogue spanning Natural Hazards Research Australia (the Centre), the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and Bushfire CRC, will provide researchers and end-users with the ability to easily search and locate previous research datasets.
Currently, there is not a way to easy locate datasets that exist – from Natural Hazards Research Australia or other organisations, but this project will make natural hazards data more accessible for all.
There are many benefits to this, explained Prof Deborah Bunker, Chief Science Officer at Natural Hazards Research Australia.
“This data catalogue will be of great benefit to the research community. It will enhance the discoverability of existing datasets, minimising replication, but in time will provide a scalable platform to share data from the full portfolio of Natural Hazards Research Australia projects.
“While the catalogue will not store the datasets themselves, it will provide a line-of-sight to the location of each dataset, as well as data access instructions as established by data holders,” Prof Bunker said.
This project has currently completed a proof of concept, which is a metadata exchange and initial research data management framework – now being tested for ease of use, navigability and implementation. Experts from FrontierSI, the University of NSW, RMIT University and NGIS came together to develop the proof-of-concept metadata exchange and research data management framework for the Centre, with support from Australian Research Data Commons through the Bushfire Data Challenges program..
This preliminary stage of the project produced two key outputs:
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The proof-of-concept research data catalogue website based on an open-source data management system used by many governments. It has been developed to allow researchers and agency staff to initially discover and locate datasets for bushfire research (to be extended to other hazard data), analysis and decision making. While the catalogue does not store the datasets themselves the catalogue will provide a line-of-sight to the location of each dataset as well as data access instructions as established by data holders.
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A research data management framework providing recommendations for data management and governance procedures for both the Centre, research providers and end-users regarding search & discovery, security, licensing and access. The framework has also guided the data catalogue’s design and provides a foundation for improvement and standardisation of data governance procedures within the centre and with external research providers and end users.
As part of the staged process, the next stage will scale-up the data catalogue’s development and implementation of the research data management framework with data from the Centre’s bushfire projects relating to the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires. This will then be extended to all Centre bushfire data, followed by data from all other hazards.
This project received investment (https://doi.org/10.47486/DC007) from the Australian Research Data Commons through the Bushfire Data Challenges program. The Australian Research Data Commons is funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.