A minimum viable product (MVP) was released on 21 May 2024. Research Link Australia (RLA) has a product roadmap for the MVP and beyond (post-MVP) that we will work through with partners and communities. Key items include:
Further development of search/discovery portal: Building on use cases and user stories we collected through the project consultation stage, the discovery interface provides human users with the capability to search and discover potential partners, experienced industry collaborators and technical experts.
The interfaces will continue to be refined and developed through stakeholder’s feedback and new use cases prioritisation. For example, latest Large Language Models could be applied to enhance data quality and linkage, to assist the question understanding and be able to answer complex queries beyond keyword search.
Further development of insight dashboards: Information entities in RLA are linked and connected through the RLA knowledge graph, which enables the offering insights on research capabilities and existing collaborative projects at different granular levels, for example, it could report on a university’s research capability, distribution of a national research funding, a national research capability of a or all research areas, and more.
The RLA platform MVP will integrate insight dashboards (like dashboards demonstrator) indicating Research R&D Capability, Funder R&D Initiative, and Business R&D Capability. Dashboards from the RLA platform will provide not only insights from an individual funder, but also insights from aggregated data of similar funding schemas across funders or research/industry capabilities as completed as collected data, for answering queries such as how much are invested in a certain research or application areas, what is research capability of a research data at the national scale.
RLA API: APIs will be added with the capability to search and access contents that underpin the RLA, to increase the uptake of RLA by industry and government and a third party who may provide tailored research-industry facilitation service.
RLA Widgets: RLA Widgets proves a quick and easy way of embedding a live RLA search within your web pages. The Widgets could be used for customised search or provide your users with a text field to specify their own search.
Private RLA space: For organisations who may not be able to share information about their collaboration or commercialisation projects for whatever reason, they could use private space to combine their own data with publicly available data from RLA to identify potential collaborators or where their research capabilities sit in the research or research-industry collaboration space, these organisations could choose to make their summarised research capabilities available for others to discover and reach out to them.
Engagement with data communities: The RLA platform services rely on good quality and wide coverage of information entities. The RLA project team will continue the engagement with potential data providers to increase the volume and the variety of data that can identify research capabilities or past collaborations from both publicly funded research organisations and industry, data include but are not limited to administrative information about research capability and collaborations, collaboration outcomes, research or industry opportunities, funding or supporting collaboration schemes, or research-industry facilitation or commercialisation services.
Engagement with data technology communities: The project team will continue to engage with data technology communities to innovate the suite of technologies that underpin the RLA platform and capabilities as offered to data users.