Our Strategy
The ARDC is Australia’s leading facility for research data infrastructure.
Learn about our strategy to support researchers to maximise their impact through access to the Thematic Research Data Commons. These coordinated, structured, and complementary activities are building data assets, tools and skills that will constitute a national ‘knowledge infrastructure’ that enables Australian researchers to transform our lives.
Our Strategy
Our strategy was developed following extensive nation-wide consultations through which we gained a deep understanding of the research community’s needs, and aligns with national government priorities. We are delivering leading-edge digital research infrastructure through 3 Thematic Research Data Commons and underpinning services and activities:
Targeted Solutions for Grand Challenges
It takes the collective efforts of research, government and industry to solve society’s greatest challenges. We’re delivering world-class digital research infrastructure to support research impact and meet Australia’s research needs.
Thematic Research Data Commons (Thematic RDC) allow the ARDC and our national partners to collaboratively develop and deliver sustainable digital research infrastructure on a national scale. The ARDC is developing a suite of Thematic RDCs, drawing on extensive experience creating digital research infrastructure over the past decade, as well as specialised data expertise and established relationships with research institutions. We’re focused on supporting the greatest number of researchers through a small number of strategic priority areas.
In partnership with the research community, we’re building 3 national-scale Thematic RDCs:
- People RDC for health and medical research
- Planet RDC for earth and environmental sciences
- HASS and Indigenous RDC for humanities, arts, social science and Indigenous research.
They enable us to best meet the needs of our diverse national research communities in a strategic and comprehensive way.
The Thematic RDCs will be enduring initiatives, with the digital research infrastructure capabilities sustained and enhanced over the long term.
They are supported by the ARDC’s unique services including data discovery, vocabulary, identifier and cloud compute services.
Our Outreach team ensures that researchers are engaged with the development of the RDCs and have the skills to use the infrastructure.
Australia’s national research cloud is specifically designed for research computing and providing underpinning cloud computing infrastructure for the ARDC’s Thematic Research Data Commons and other services. It provides the research community with fast, interactive, self-service access to large-scale computing infrastructure, software and data. A powerful platform for collaboration, it allows researchers and research support staff to access compute resources, software and data from their offices and homes and easily share them with collaborators at other institutions.
This strategic activity provides essential information services for Australian research including online data discovery services, identifier services and a vocabulary development and discovery service. The products include persistent identifier services (PIDS), Research Data Australia and Research Vocabularies Australia. The major initiatives are the Australian National Persistent Identifier (PID) Strategy and Roadmap and Research Link Australia.
The ARDC provides national leadership, working together with research institutions and research infrastructure in building digital research skills. This will ensure both the research and the research infrastructure workforce have the skills required to build and use digital research infrastructure now and into the future.
