Empowering research with data catalogue for grains industry

Federation University's Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI) has played a key role in developing a national data catalogue that will give researchers access to years' worth of information and accelerate the release of new technology and knowledge in the grains industry.

The Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) recently launched the GRDC Data Catalogue – a tool that aims to simplify finding large quantities of grains research, development and extension (RD&E) data generated by GRDC's investments over the past 20 years.

GRDC manages hundreds of RD&E projects at any given time, most of which generate new data like yield, soil, genetic, weather and other experimental data. GRDC’s Data Catalogue houses metadata describing the data assets, information on how to find them, and the ability to request access from GRDC's research partners.

CeRDI's involvement in the project began in mid-2022 when the team began developing a tool to enable GRDC's research partners to enter metadata about their data assets into the catalogue.

Federation librarian Peggy Hsu, who joined CeRDI for the project, says GRDC was keen to develop the data catalogue to bring the information together and create high reuse value from that information.

"We found that many research partners had their most valuable datasets lurking on people's computers or internal systems that weren't easily findable and had the very distinct possibility of becoming lost forever," she said.

"GRDC had co-owned and co-invested in all of these datasets, and wanted to have that transparency with their research partners – it was very much about making the data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).

"We had to make sure that there were appropriate metadata attached to the records by getting each partner's internal infrastructure set up so that they could store the data in a public-facing repository so that it could be accessed. But not everything can or should be accessible publicly, but at least the metadata records could be."

Challenges included working with datasets from partners across universities, state governments and other organisations, each with different legislative requirements.

The data will be stored and managed by GRDC's research partners and made discoverable through the GRDC Data Catalogue's singular portal.

The metadata records in GRDC’s Data Catalogue are outputs from GRDC’s Data Partnerships Initiative that engaged 12 GRDC research partners to generate high-value metadata records to populate the GRDC Data Catalogue and build data management expertise and capacity.

CeRDI research coordinator Jennifer Corbett says there were plenty of meetings with GRDC to determine what was needed for the project and monthly community-of-practice meetings with the research partners.

"The community of practice enabled the sharing of knowledge and expertise – there were librarians from some organisations, researchers with particular expertise in agriculture, as well as people with IT skills," she said.

"You've got all these different domains coming together and helping each other, some from universities and others from state government departments – there was a lot of growth in the community as the project went on."

She says CeRDI prepared resources to support research partners developing high-quality, high-value metadata records that met GRDC's and broader sector needs.

"We provided research partners with guidance and support while the digital catalogue system was being developed by GRDC’s technology partner.

"The Federation team led the work to confirm GRDC requirements and then provided tailored metadata creation tools and resources to support research partners in creating high quality descriptions of the co-owned data and other resources that have been generated through GRDC supported research."

GRDC research data manager Dr Washington Gapare says GRDC’s Data Catalogue will increase the visibility of GRDC co-owned data assets and ultimately improve tender applications and research outcomes.

"Special thanks to the Federation University team for their assistance in every aspect of the Data Partnerships Initiative," he said.

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Supporting data sharing to improve food security