Ms Enming Zhang, Ms Shikha Chawla
Biography:
Enming is a highly accomplished Business Analyst with a strong track record in leveraging evolving digital capabilities to deliver innovative and impactful solutions across the research and data infrastructure landscape. With deep expertise in Agile delivery, Enming is adept at bridging the gap between business needs and technical capabilities, fostering strong collaboration between diverse stakeholder groups and IT teams. Her strategic insight and analytical rigour have consistently driven successful project outcomes, ensuring alignment with organisational priorities, compliance standards, and long-term digital transformation goals. Enming’s leadership and experience make her a trusted advisor in navigating complex, data-centric initiatives.
Shikha is an experienced Business Analyst with deep expertise in emerging technologies, data governance, and the delivery of innovative, data-driven solutions in complex research and digital infrastructure environments. With a strong command of Agile methodologies, she excels at fostering cross-functional collaboration between stakeholders and IT teams to translate strategic objectives into actionable outcomes. Shikha is passionate about enabling continuous improvement, ensuring data integrity, and aligning project deliverables with organisational policy and compliance frameworks. Her work consistently bridges the gap between technical implementation and business value, supporting the development of scalable, sustainable digital research ecosystems.
Abstract:
Research Data Australia (RDA) and Research Link Australia (RLA) are national discovery services supporting the Australian research sector. At the heart of both platforms lies a robust infrastructure built on persistent identifiers (PIDs) and a dynamic metadata index that enables rich, interlinked discovery experiences.
This presentation explores the technical design and implementation underpinning RDA and RLA, focusing on how PIDs such as DOIs, ORCIDs, and RAiDs form the backbone of a continuously evolving PID graph. This graph enables contextual connections between datasets, publications, researchers, institutions, and projects, ensuring both discoverability and provenance.
In parallel, a highly tuned metadata indexing pipeline supports responsive and scalable search capabilities across millions of records. We discuss the challenges of harmonising heterogeneous metadata, strategies for graph enrichment, and approaches to real-time updates and synchronisation between the PID graph and search index.
By presenting lessons learned and opportunities ahead, this talk provides insight into how national-scale infrastructure can leverage identifiers to support research visibility, reuse, and trust.