Adding Activity nodes to Research Graph

[aaryani]

There are a number of research projects that may have many-to-many relationships with Grants. These projects have connections to research instruments, services, research graphs and research outcomes. The proposal here is to add a capability in Research Graph schema/infrastructure to capture these relationships.

At this stage, the only Research Activity ID that we know is RAiD: https://www.raid.org.au

These are open questions to answer:

• What are the attributes of the Research Activity?
• What are the data sources (data providers) for Research Activites?
• Do we need a new node type for Research Activity? or can it be an Auxillary node?
• What are the differences between Research Activity and Project?
• What is the closest type in Schema.org, can we use http://schema.org/Action?

One form of integration can be importing Activity nodes as supporting information with full metadata from the source, and established the link to other Research Graph nodes using relatedTo relationship in the graph.

[SiobhannMcCafferty]

Some Q&A background from the Standards Australia new Work Item document.

When is a new RAiD appropriate? Etc etc
-A new RAiD is appropriate for any project or research activity with no previously assigned RAiD. Subsidiary project work packages may be assigned new RAiDs to be associated with larger project RAiD.
-Who may assign a RAiD?
Any RAiD integrated Service Point or infrastructure service which has signed and returned the RAiD service agreement may assign a RAiD.
-Who may edit a RAiD to add ORCIDs etc?
Editing of RAiDs is a manual process and may only be done by the Service Point.

-When two projects come together what happens to their respective RAiDs – Assign an new one?
When two project come together it is appropriate to mint a new RAiD for the new combined project entity.
-Is it anticipated that a network of registration agencies (i.e. RAiD minting organisations) will be
required?
This is not currently anticipated.
-Can we keep intelligence out of the RAiD Number?
The RAiD Handle does not contain any humanly readable information.

[leskneebone]

are schema.org properties needed for particular use cases?

I think FOAF is relevant here too; see "Project": http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Project
A FOAF approach might build a bridge with DCAT (https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/)

[aaryani]

To my knowledge, there is no research activity model in schema.org [yet]. However, I hope this changes soon.

FOAF is also relevant, and potentially a topic for new investigation. Do you think foaf:Project properties can capture APO activity records?

[leskneebone]

There doesn't seem to be a "Properties include:" statement in that spec. But from the notes it is clear that foaf:homePage is relevant and we would most certainly use that.

foaf:currentProject and foaf:pastProject are also mentioned in the notes - these properties seem odd to me. Surely start and end dates associated with a projects can be used to infer a researchers involvement? I guess if a researcher dropped out of a project before it was finished, but still wanted to assert that it was a pastProject, then these approaches would supplement date ranges. But I'd want to be convinced of that - seems like an over-baked approach.

[leskneebone]

What are the differences between Research Activity and Project?
At APO we had a discussion about using grants databases to discover current research projects (such as ARC grants database). We noticed that within the Linkage program, the ARC Centres of Excellence is probably a research activity doesn't fit intuitively with the notion of 'project'. The key differences may relate simply scale - a Centre of Excellence may have more participants and a longer duration than other projects.

Therein lies a grey area where a 'centre' might be considered a Project or an Organisation (which are both foaf classes). We do keep records about research organisations at APO and therefore the distinction is relevant to our operations.

[leskneebone]

What are the attributes of the Research Activity?
A good starting point might be to check what are the attributes of a RAID object. Is that documented somewhere?