Developing the Discovery Layer in the University Research E-Infrastructure

Governments worldwide are faced with the challenge of creating research e-infrastructures to not only manage but also make accessible and discoverable increasingly large amounts of research data. Universities in turn are under pressure to ensure that their research strategies and support services are aligned with these national imperatives. This paper describes a nationally funded Australian university initiative to build a research e-infrastructure layer which connects individual researchers and the University to the Research Data Australia service in order to expose details of their research activity as well as available research data outputs. As governments work towards fully functional e-infrastructures which will be both cross-disciplinary and cross-border, the semantic metadata exchange service described in this paper offers a model which supports the interactive discovery of, and navigation to, content that may reside locally or across the world.