Building an Australian User Community for Vivo: Profiling Research Data for the Australian National Data Service

Research Data Australia (RDA) is a web site established by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) for the purpose of describing data collections produced by or relevant to Australian researchers and to promote visibility of research data collections in search engines. In order to populate RDA, ANDS has established various funding programs, one of which is the Metadata Stores program. This program is aimed at ensuring that Universities have sustainable mechanisms in place, for both collecting information on research data collections, and for allowing RDA to harvest appropriate collections well beyond the initial ANDS funding cycle. As part of activities associated with ANDS, an increasing number of Australian Universities are choosing to deploy a semantic web application called VIVO, to profile information about institutional research data sets, both locally and as part of a national data commons. VIVO was originally developed at Cornell University but is now being rapidly developed by several institutions for widespread adoption. To date, the University of Melbourne, Griffith University, the Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Western Australia have all chosen to implement VIVO, with interest from other Universities growing.