Dr Nicholas Car1
1KurrawongAI, Brisbane, Australia
Biography:
Nicholas worked for a decade in informatics research at Australian universities and government research organisations – CSIRO. His PhD focussed on decision modelling using Semantic Web ontologies for irrigation.
He has worked in international Semantic Web standards development in the areas of data profiling and spatial data.
Since 2018, Nicholas has worked in the private sector supplying commercial and free open source Knowledge Graph-based products and services.
In 2022, Nicholas founded KurrawongAI to focus on product-independent consulting.
Abstract:
As of 2025, Australian research units, government, and the private sector have published Semantic Web vocabularies for over a decade. Publication and use is growing but perhaps slowly. Discussions with producers and users indicate that difficult vocabulary discovery is a barrier to increased growth. Reducing it could improve use, via reuse, and publication, by vocab extension.
No single technical facility meets all vocabulary-related needs of publisher and user communities. In the geology/resources domain, at least five government bodies (e.g. Geoscience Australia (GA), the Government Geoscience Information Committee (GGIC), and state Geological Surveys), the ARDC’s Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA), and several international organisations publish domain-specific vocabs, thus all must be searched for relevant content.
We have tried to introduce cross-system search into vocab tools widely used in the geology/resources domain but this has proved difficult for operators as each must maintain information about all other organisation’s facilities in the sector to provide effective search.
To overcome this, we have produced Australian geology/resources domain and environmental domain-specific vocabulary discovery portals within which we maintain access to all known sector-specific and several generic vocabulary facilities, such as RVA and the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying & Mapping (ICSM)’s systems.
We have surveyed geology/resources vocabulary users and producers about the value of this facility and we present those results as well as details about operational effort. From these we give a cost/benefit analysis of the work and future plans.