Dr Megan Wong2, Donald Hobern3, Dr Steven McEachern4, Professor Douglas Boyle5, Dr Natalia Atkins6, Kheeran Dharmawardena7, Dr Lesley Wyborn1,8
1NCI, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 2Federation University, Mt Helen, Australia, 3University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia, 4University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Australia, 5Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), Hobart, Australia, 6The University Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 7Cytrax, Melbourne, Australia, 8AuScope Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Megan is a Research Associate in eResearch (PhD – Soil Ecology) with a background in science and education. Her research interests are in enabling sustainable information management and knowledge transfer, and its application to environmental management. Megan's current work focuses on helping ensure agricultural and natural resource management data, information and knowledge is globally available to researchers, government agencies, municipalities and the public, with a focus on making data understandable by both humans and machines (semantic interoperability).
Abstract:
Vocabularies are the anchor points that humans and machines rely on for effective and efficient data processing. Vocabularies encompass controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies and metadata schemas, and form part of an ecosystem that includes the people, resources, standards, tools, platforms, policies, and practices that make them accessible and useful for researchers.
Currently in Australia the vocabulary ecosystem is fragmented and not effectively coordinated. Many existing vocabularies are not findable, let alone accessible, interoperable and reusable by machines (i.e., not FAIR), limiting the uptake of machine-learning and artificial intelligence technologies to leverage existing data for new insights and to model complex systems at scale.
To address these issues, in 2022 a Vocabulary Workshop was held, sponsored by the Australian Data Archive, the Australian Research Data Commons and CODATA. A proposal for a Community Roadmap emerged that focused on what was required to make vocabularies machine-actionable (FAIR) and well-governed. Regular community consultations were held through BoFs at eResearch Australasia in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and the AeRO eResearch Newsletter.
The resultant '2025 Strategic Community Roadmap for an Australian FAIR Vocabulary Ecosystem' aims to facilitate wider adoption and broader community engagement for machine-actionable vocabularies, with a focus on the social and technical support required to overcome current data interoperability challenges. Fifty-seven recommendations are presented organised around four strategic themes, highlighting their importance and urgency for implementation.
This presentation will offer an overview of the roadmap and will provide feedback to the community on their valuable contributions at the 2022-2024 eResearch Australasia Conferences.