ResData is a Library service for managing research metadata and data at UNSW Australia. The service has two main components: a Research Data Management Plan (RDMP), which allows researchers to record metadata about research projects and data; a catalogue of research datasets that are published to a national data discovery service (Research Data Australia).

The ResData service contributes to fulfilment of UNSW responsibilities relating to curation of research data, and encourages researchers to adopt effective data management practices. A primary goal of the service is to minimise duplication of effort for researchers by enabling re-use of information and metadata where possible. An important use case is re-purposing metadata for data management plans to pre-populate the form for deposit of dataset records, and for further use in reporting for various purposes. Information from the University’s data warehouse, likewise, is available at all collection points and supports interoperability with storage systems. Linking dataset records to publications in the University’s open access repository is also supported.

Re-use of information within ResData is facilitated by an RDF ontology underpinning the service. The ontology defines a set of standards-based metadata elements, including dataset, process/method, project/grant, party/contributor and research data management plans that relate to information capture, querying, storage and exchange. These elements are realised in a number of workflows including integration with feeds from the UNSW enterprise HR and grant management systems as well as the UNSW Data Archive. The service also exploits mechanisms for information exchange, such as linked data and OAI-PMH harvesting, to expose metadata and move it around, so that UNSW and other researchers are easily able to use, re-use and reproduce research data and workflows.

Future plans for ResData will focus on extending the service to keep pace with changes to the area of research data management and publishing, including those influenced by funding policy reforms, and emergent research practices. Important enhancements relate to integrating with institutional systems for ethics approval of research and incorporation of Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) metadata to support movement of ResData records to the Australian Data Archive. Preparation for the latter is in progress with creation of a crosswalk from RIF-CS (metadata schema used in RDA) to DDI.