Mr Les Kneebone1
1University of Melbourne – Centre Of Excellence For Biosecurity Risk Analysis, Parkville, Australia
Biosecurity is a field focused on protecting a country’s agricultural, environmental, and social assets from the introduction, spread and impact of invasive species and diseases. It achieves this by implementing pre-border, border and post-border activities that are informed by a range of disciplinary domains such as ecology, statistics, economics, psychology and sociology. Consequently, inputs to biosecurity capability are cross-disciplinary and cross-industry in nature.
A challenge faced by biosecurity practitioners and policy-makers is that the information sources used to support biosecurity activities are disparate, featuring a mix of traditional and ‘grey’ publishing workflows. Finding, identifying and obtaining this information is a considerable challenge, especially when content is either paywalled or not web-discoverable.
Moreover, due to the cross-disciplinary and cross-industry nature of biosecurity, terminology is rarely consistent within search repositories. Indeed, the term ‘biosecurity’ is not always mentioned in relevant literature. Names of priority threats, surveillance methods and controls vary between jurisdictions and domains.
To address access issues, the Centre of Excellent for Biosecurity Research (CEBRA) is building a research portal to assist information uptake by biosecurity practitioners and policy-makers. The portal establishes pipelines to source content and metadata from a range of sources. Discovery features in the portal utilise controlled vocabularies, built with Research Vocabularies Australia editing tools. Vocabularies intersect key biosecurity concepts and basic search results. Graphic representations of concepts, automatically extracted from documents using artificial intelligence, support identification of gaps in biosecurity research. We present results of a beta system and invite comments.
Biography:
Les has held information management roles in public, research and non-profit organisations since 2004. His research interests include semantic web solutions for improving research platforms, and metadata and taxonomies for research, policy and education collections. Les is also interested in history and philosophy of science, and risk analysis.