Dr Nicholas Car1, Ms Sandra Silcot2
1Kurrawong AI, Shorncliffe, Australia, 2University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
The Indigenous Data Network (IDN) is producing a metadata schema for, and a demonstration catalogue of, indigenous data in Australia. We want to assist indigenous data holders to increase indigenous governance of indigenous data by being able to represent specific agent roles and data ratings according to various principles. Our metadata schema profiles the Data Catalogue Vocabulary (DCAT): both constraining it and extending it.
Automatically assessing whether data is indigenous – about, by or related to indigenous people – is our first challenge. Our second is to create executable mappings from our profile of DCAT to principles models, such as Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (CARE) so scores for data can be automatically calculated from metadata.
So far, we have performed some simple, automated, assessments of data’s indigenousness, formalised our schema, made first versions of mappings and have a catalogue implementation presenting metadata and scores online according to Linked Data principles. We conclude that we can better model indigenous concerns with our profile than standard DCAT, our challenges can at least be partly automated and our catalogue allows us to demonstrate the schema and mappings in was similar to standard catalogues. We also conclude that some CARE and similar principle assessment scores, in their current form, may never be able to be aromatically determined using metadata.
Next steps are to test the schema and mappings with the eResearch and indigenous communities and assess feasibility of existing indigenous data holding catalogue adoption.
Biography:
Nicholas Car is a data modeller specialising in Semantic Web applications. He has worked for Australian research and operational government agencies for many years, such as CSIRO and Geoscience Australia, as well as in the private tech sector. Currently he is implementing national-scale semantic spatial data models for Australian states and indigenous data modelling for the Indigenous Data Network.