Research Vocabularies Australia
Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA) is an easily accessible service for creating, managing, finding and accessing controlled vocabularies used in research.
Why Vocabularies are Important
An agreed vocabulary (a community standard) is critical when researchers are sharing data or combining data from different sources to make sure the meaning of that data is clear and explicit.
It also provides a good starting point for translating concepts into other discipline vocabularies so that collaboration can occur.
How RVA Helps Researchers
RVA helps researchers find and use vocabularies. RVA also makes it possible for Australian research organisations to publish, re-purpose, create and manage their own controlled vocabularies. Vocabularies change over time, so the service enables management of new versions while retaining superseded versions.
Our goal for the RVA portal is to describe any controlled vocabularies commonly used by or relevant to Australian researchers. Our list is constantly growing.
We work with research organisations to enable software interaction with hosted vocabularies, and to develop the service in response to their needs.
Using the RVA Service
Anyone can search, browse and access the vocabularies described in the RVA portal. You can also self-register to describe or upload a vocabulary.
- Find and learn about controlled vocabularies relevant to research.
- Access those vocabularies and reuse them in your community.
- Integrate vocabularies into your local information systems at a technical level.
- Upload and describe a vocabulary to share with others.
- Make a vocabulary machine readable so it more easily integrates into other systems.
- Create new or import existing vocabularies and manage them with your community’s input.
Request the addition of a vocabulary or suggest changes to a vocabulary.
Access to the RVA editor is restricted to ARDC partner organisations (Australian research organisations, including universities, research institutes, collecting organisations and government agencies). Partners can use the RVA editor to create new machine-readable vocabularies.
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